Do not ever speak to me about family again.

And then I blocked each of them, one by one, and with each name I felt not grief, but the specific lightness of a man setting down a weight he had been told his whole life it was his sacred duty to carry, and discovering, at last, that it had never been his to carry at all.

Chapter 18 — My Real Family

Six months later, Wendy, our son, and I moved out of that apartment and into a sunlit home in a quiet coastal neighborhood, far away from the cold rooms where the worst of it had happened.

Wendy recovered.

Fully.