But because I wanted to.
He smiled against my lips.
And when we finally stepped apart, I looked around the gallery.
At the paintings.
At the people who had supported me.
At the life I had rebuilt.
For years, I’d believed freedom meant finding someone strong enough to protect me.
Now I understood something different.
Freedom meant becoming strong enough to choose what happened next.
And love, if it was real, would never demand that I surrender that freedom.
It would respect it.
I thought back to the night I’d hidden beneath Damien’s desk.
Barefoot.
Terrified.
Certain my life was about to collapse.
I remembered Brandon’s furious voice.
The guards standing near the wall.
The powerful stranger who refused to decide my future for me.
And those three words.
She decides.
At the time, I thought Damien had been speaking to my husband.
Now I realized he’d been speaking to me too.
Reminding me of something I’d almost forgotten.
My life was mine.
My voice mattered.
My future belonged to me.
And no matter how much power another person possessed, nobody had the right to take those things away.
That was the night I stopped living as the woman Brandon wanted me to be.
And began becoming the woman I had always been underneath the fear.
I was Hannah Mitchell.
