Freedom is a quieter thing than people expect.

I had imagined, in the worst months of the disguise, that unmasking myself would feel like a trumpet — like vindication arriving with fanfare.

It didn’t.

It felt like a room going quiet after a long argument.

I would not marry again soon, and perhaps not ever; two years had taught me how expensive it is to find out whether a person is telling you the truth, and I am not sure I have another two years of that in me.

But I had also learned something on the far side of it that I could not have learned any other way, and it was worth, in the end, what it cost.