The one had nothing to do with the other.

My mother had spent six years treating my children as instruments of her will.

I was not going to spend the next six treating them as instruments of my forgiveness.

Chapter 19 — Showing Up

The road back to Rosalind was the slowest road of all, and it should have been, and I would not have trusted it if it had been any faster.

She had spent six years building an independent life without me — a life with its own rhythms, its own safety, its own hard-won peace — and I had no right to come striding back into the center of it simply because a flight had been delayed.