The porch where I was thrown down is also the porch where he read the weather wrong and kissed me goodbye a thousand mornings.

I get to decide which of those the house is, and I decide, every single day, by living in it, by raising our daughter in it, by filling its rooms with a new life until the old wounds are only one thin layer under everything good that came after.

That is a kind of power I did not know I had until I’d survived the people who spent my whole life insisting I didn’t.

My daughter is learning to walk now, in the upstairs hallway where her father once sat swearing at the instructions to her crib.