And Brooke needed to understand that remorse does not come with a deadline attached — that she didn’t get to decide when I was finished being hurt.

I said all of it plainly, without heat, and that was new too. A year and a half earlier I would have delivered a list like that as an apology in disguise, hedged and softened, half-taking it back as I went, terrified of being the difficult one.

Now I just said it, the way Rebecca said things, the way Evelyn said things — as information, as terms, as the shape the thing would take if it was going to take any shape at all.

My father wrote them down. He actually took out his phone and made a note, and I don’t know why that small thing moved me, except that in thirty years I had never once seen either of my parents treat something I needed as a fact to be recorded rather than a mood to be waited out.

My mother closed her eyes, and I wondered if she was remembering the sound of Trevor’s laugh through the door.

“Do you still think of us as your family?” she asked.