I had been that tired for years and called it marriage.

And when I finally stepped out from under all of them and let them fall, the tired lifted, all at once, and did not come back.

That is how I knew, for certain, that I had done the right thing.

Not because they fell.

Because I could finally, after seven years, stand up straight.

Chapter 19 — True Power

I have turned Evelyn’s words over many times since, because I think she said, on a porch swing with a plate of muffins, the truest thing anyone said to me in the whole ordeal.

For years I had believed — without ever examining the belief — that my worth was somehow bound up in the estate.