He was burning the children to keep the furniture — spending his family’s trust, and nearly his daughter herself, to protect a pride that should have been the cheapest thing in the house.

Lauren saw it instantly, and named it, and I think the naming was the beginning of the repair, because you cannot fix a thing until you can say precisely what is broken.

What was broken in Ethan was not his heart.

It was his hierarchy.

And a hierarchy, unlike a heart, can be reordered, deliberately, over time, by a man willing to do the humbling work of learning, at last, what ought to have come first all along.

Chapter 16 — Exactly Where She Belonged