I smiled, and I stepped back inside my office, and I locked the door behind me, and I understood, with a certainty as clear and clean as the mountain air, that my life, finally and completely, belonged only to me.

I want to end on the lock, that small ordinary sound of a bolt sliding home, because it contained more than security.

For seven years, I had lived in a house, and then a marriage, with no real locks at all, not because there were no doors but because I had never been permitted to control who came through them.

Tessa had a card to my finances.