On the afternoon of Jan. 17, Manning was in the prison workshop, covered head to toe in wood shavings. She remembers looking up to see a team of security personnel enter the room. “I’m like, Oh, God, I’m in a lot of trouble,” Manning told me. “I don’t even know what the hell I’ve done now.”’ The prison’s head of security told her to come with them.

“Am I coming back?” she asked. No, she was told.

She grabbed her belongings and followed the guards to the Special Housing Unit. Assuming she was going back to solitary, she started to take the shoelaces out of her boots. The lead officer shook his head: She was headed for Protective Custody. In the common area, a television was playing CNN. She saw the banner on the screen: Manning’s sentence commuted, it read.

Manning told me she went numb. She never let herself think about a commutation, lest she be thrown back into a deeper darkness. “It was so hard for me to process and deal with it,” Manning recalled. Obama later addressed the decision with an implicit rebuke to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. “Let’s be clear: Chelsea Manning has served a tough prison sentence, so the notion that the average person who was thinking about disclosing vital classified information would think that it goes unpunished, I don’t think would get that impression from the sentence that Chelsea Manning has served,” he said.

Four months later, on the morning of May 17, Manning was marched out the front door of the U.S.D.B. and loaded into a Ford Explorer. The driver steered the S.U.V. up a short slope and onto the curved road that winds south, past the gates of the overgrown U.S.D.B. cemetery, where 14 executed German prisoners of war were buried in 1945. A constellation of brick buildings appeared in the distance. Close to 1 a.m., the Explorer drew to a halt in a parking lot, where Strangio and the veteran attorney Nancy Hollander were waiting. Manning was so eager to hug the two attorneys that she clocked Strangio in the face with her elbow.

The week I spent with Manning in New York felt like a moment of suspended animation: the days between all the chaos of her life before and whatever was going to come next. In her final months at the U.S.D.B., Manning put together 300 pages of memoir, and she’s acquired an agent to shop the draft around. This fall, she will appear in a documentary called “XY Chelsea,” produced by Laura Poitras. Her attorneys, meanwhile, continue to work on her appeal. Even if she is exonerated, it is hard to know how comfortable her life will be in the years to come, given that some of the nation will never likely reconcile itself to what she did.

But she is determined not to dwell on her reputation, and for that week in Manhattan, she seemed happy being free. We trudged, unnoticed, through busy city streets, ordered chicken nuggets at McDonald’s, ate in restaurants and cafes and went to a weekend screening of “Alien: Covenant.” On the way into the theater, the man collecting the tickets asked to check Manning’s bag. I held my breath, thinking she would be recognized. But kneeling, Manning unzipped the main compartment, revealing her laptop. She was waved through: The famous whistle-blower and former military prisoner had become just another Sunday evening theatergoer.

It occurred to me that if Manning sometimes seemed to have difficulty interpreting the effect her actions had on the world, it was in part a result of the extraordinary isolation she had experienced even before her arrest, in her childhood in Crescent, when she longed for a solution for her pain. Later, in solitary in Kuwait or Quantico, or in the special housing unit at the U.S.D.B., that isolation had been made physical: The “feedback loop” she had spoken of to me had been torn. Now she had the ability to live publicly and openly as she always knew she was, and she was adjusting to the idea, sinking into it as if it were a cold pond. More than once, as we walked the streets of New York, I felt I was in the presence of someone coming fully alive for the very first time. Manning told me she understood that her identity and the actions that led to her arrest have long been tangled up in the public imagination, sometimes in uncomfortable ways: An appellate brief filed last year by Manning’s legal team implied that the Army’s inability to treat Manning’s gender dysphoria was a contributing factor in the leaks. Manning didn’t want to discuss “hypotheticals,” what would have happened if circumstances were different, but she was adamant on one thing: “What I can tell you,” she said, “is that my values would have been the same. The things I care about would have been the same.”