I had places I lived, the apartment with my mother, the small rooms after, but home in the fuller sense, the sense of a place in the world that is yours by right, that holds your story, that you belong to and that belongs to you, I had never had that.

I had felt, always, like a person passing through, unrooted, provisional.

And my father, it turned out, had spent twenty years and everything he had making sure that I would have one.

Not a house, though he had left me those too.

A place in the world.

A name that was truly mine.

A story I could stand inside without shame.

A spot on the edge of a continent where my parents had once been happy, given back to me so that I could stand in it and know, at last, that I came from somewhere, that I belonged to someone, that I was not a fragment but a continuation.