What I reclaimed was the lock.

The right to decide who enters my life and who does not.

The authority over my own boundaries that a person is supposed to possess by default and that I had let a grasping family take from me one reasonable-seeming concession at a time.

When I turned that bolt in my own office, in my own firm, that bore my own name, I was not just securing a room.

I was exercising, deliberately and with enormous satisfaction, the power I had spent seven years without: the power to close a door, and to know that it would stay closed, and that no one, ever again, held a copied key to my life.

That is what freedom turned out to be, in the end.

Not wealth, though I had that.

Not vindication, though I had that too.

It was the simple, radical, hard-won ability to lock my own door, and to be, at last, the only person on earth who held the key.