When they left, Margot hugged me at the gate. I let her. She looked at me for a moment and said she hoped this wasn’t the end of us. I told her I hoped it wasn’t either. I meant it, but I also knew I wasn’t making a promise. Hope could exist without reopening the door to everything that had happened before. For once, I didn’t feel responsible for deciding what she wanted the relationship to become.

We haven’t spoken since. In another life, that silence might have hurt me. After ten years of being treated like an outsider, though, it felt different now. The difference was that this time, I wasn’t waiting for someone else to decide whether I belonged. I was standing in my own house, looking out at the water, with the keys in my pocket and the gate under my control. They had spent years deciding when I was included. Now I was the one deciding the terms. And for the first time, that decision was mine.