I burned it down on purpose, with a clear head, because a burned field is where you get to plant something new.

And the thing I planted in the ashes is thriving, in a garden, in the sun, reaching for a butterfly, entirely unaware that she was ever, even for one rainy night, locked outside.

I reached down and lifted my daughter out of her jumper, and she gripped my collar in one small fist and pressed her warm face into my neck, and I held her close and stepped down off the porch into the garden, into the warm morning sun, into a small house with a wooden fence in a quiet town, where no one believed they were entitled to us, and no one ever would.

Luca had changed a lock, once, to keep me out of a house.

He had never understood that he could not lock me out of a home, because I was the home.

I always had been.

And I carried it with me, that night in the rain and every day since, in my own two arms — finally, completely, and unconditionally home.