Damon, in time, was granted court-monitored visitation, and he has to build whatever relationship he is going to have with his daughter slowly, from nothing, on supervised afternoons, no longer the man who believed he held all the power over everyone around him — just a man living, now, inside the permanent consequences of his own choices.
I do not hate him.
Hating him would give him a room in a life he no longer has any right to enter.
I looked out at the water with my daughter warm against me, and I understood that I had done the two things that ever actually mattered.
I had protected her.
And I had taken back my grandmother’s legacy, and my own name, and the simple truth that my worth was never, for one single day, defined by the men who tried to convince me they got to set the price.
THE END.
