Marathe and Kate at Ryle's (p. 779)
‘You saved somebody’s freaking life, Ramy. I’d give my left nut for a chance to pull myself out of the shadow of the wing that way, Ramy.’ ‘You are not seeing this. It was this frozen with the terror woman, she saved my life. For this saved my life. This moment broke my moribund chains, Katherine. In one instant and without thought I was allowed to choose something as more important than my thinking of my life. Her, she allowed this will without thinking. She with one blow broke the chains of the cage of pain at my half a body and nation. When I had crawled back to my fauteuil and placed my tipped fauteuil aright and I was again seated I realized the pain of inside no longer pained me. I became, then, adult. I was permitted leaving the pain of my own loss and pain at the top of Switzerland’s Mont Papineau.’
Context
The correction that is the scene's hinge: not hero-therapy but rescue inverted — she saved him, by permitting a choice of something outside the self, the only exit from the cage the book ever endorses. Kate's "shadow of the wing" extends her black-wing idiom; her wish for "a chance to pull myself out" is the theme's saddest subjunctive.