What she had was a business, a bank account that answered to no one but her, and a life in which no one could ever again demand her silence as the price of belonging.
Rhys wrote to her once, to thank her for the truth that had set him free.
Dorian wrote many times — apologies curdling into blame and then, at last, into nothing.
She never answered him.
She had learned that closure does not arrive on the day the person who wronged you finally understands what they did.
It arrives on the day you stop needing them to understand at all.
For a long time she had imagined that healing would come as a scene — Dorian, ruined and remorseful, finally grasping the full weight of what he’d done to her, and Odette, vindicated, watching the understanding break over his face.
She had wanted that scene the way you want water.
And the strange gift of the year after the gala was learning that the scene, even if it ever came, would not have healed anything, because it would have kept her tethered to him — waiting on his comprehension, still organizing her peace around his reaction, still, in some quiet way, in his court.
Real freedom, it turned out, was not his understanding.