The house was the natural consequence of a family that had treated a daughter’s love as an entitlement until the daughter, at last, stopped funding the arrangement.

I had not pushed them into the street.

I had simply stopped carrying them, and a family that cannot stand without being carried by the child they would not drive two hours to celebrate was a family already fallen; they had only failed, until now, to feel the ground.

I felt the grief of it — I will not pretend I felt nothing, standing in the house where I grew up, watching my father understand he would lose it.

But I did not feel guilt, and there is a great difference between the two.

Grief is what you feel when something is lost.