Becky
I stood in the doorway of my bedroom that night, alone for the first time in days, and let myself finally sit with everything that had shifted over the past seventy-two hours. Four separate conversations, four separate declarations, and somewhere in the middle of it, a decision that felt both entirely mine and entirely inevitable, like I'd simply stopped fighting against something that had been true for weeks already.
I thought about my mother, the way I always seemed to when I was on the verge of something she would have judged harshly, some old reflex still checking her disapproval before I could fully claim anything for myself. I thought about the tabloids, the strangers online who'd already decided who I was based on a fraction of the truth. I thought about what they'd say if t
