I had had apartments, rooms, places to sleep between shifts, addresses where Caleb and I kept our few belongings and held on.

But a home is more than a roof; it is a place where you are safe, and wanted, and not afraid, where the people in it are glad of one another and no one is waiting for anyone else to leave.

By that measure I had been homeless my whole adult life, however many keys I carried, and I had not even known it, because you cannot miss what you have never once had.

Only when I found it, in the least likely place imaginable, in the coastal house of a dying stranger I had married for money, did I finally understand what I had been without.