I had trained them to walk on me by being, every single time, exactly as reasonable and forgiving as they needed me to be to keep going.

Six years of that is not one wound.

It’s a thousand hairline fractures, and a woman can walk around on a thousand hairline fractures for a very long time, right up until the moment she sees her mother over a stove, and the whole structure gives at once.

Chapter 4 — We’re Leaving

I didn’t yell.

I unbuckled Emrys from the wrap and set him gently on the floor, and I wiped my mother’s burning face with a dish towel, and I took her trembling hand in mine.