They had forgotten one thing, and it was the only thing that ever mattered.

A woman who has built her own foundation — with her own hands, her own money, her own quiet and unwatched preparation — cannot, in the end, be trapped by people who have never learned to do anything but live off someone else’s labor.

They held no power over me.

They only had access to my earnings, and to my silence, and the instant I withdrew both, there was nothing of theirs left standing at all.

The whole towering structure of their importance had been built, the entire time, on the foundation of me — and I had, at last, walked out from underneath it, and let it fall.

And I have thought a great deal, in the months since, about that word — foundation — because it turned out to be the truest thing in the whole story, and the thing Julian and Fiona understood least.