I think about that phrase often now, that a woman’s resolve cannot be stolen from a safe, because it is the lesson I most want my daughter to carry out of a story she is too young to remember, and one day, when she is old enough, I will tell her all of it.

Not to make her hate her father, whom I will let her form her own conclusions about in her own time, but so that she will understand the one thing that her grandmother most wanted to disprove and most completely failed to.

Evelyn built her entire cruelty on a theory of where a person’s power lives.

She believed it lived in external things: in family connections, in a husband, in money, in documents, in social standing, in all the possessions and relationships that can be granted and revoked, given and taken away.

And by that theory, I was powerless, because I had none of the external things she valued; I was an orphan, dependent on a marriage, my identity reducible to a phone and a passport that could be lifted from a safe.