“I never needed anything from you.

That was always the part you got wrong.” And it was true, and saying it aloud broke something loose in me that had been stuck for years.

Because the deepest chain the Calloways had ever had on me was not the money or the marriage or even the fear.

It was my wanting of their approval.

As long as I wanted them to think well of me, they held power over me, because a person whose good opinion you crave can wound you simply by withholding it, and the Calloways had wounded me that way a thousand times, in a thousand small withholdings, over all the years I spent auditioning for a family that had already decided I would never pass.

And the moment Colette asked me what I wanted from them, I heard my own true answer arrive, and it astonished me, because for so long the honest answer would have been everything, would have been please, would have been just once, tell me I am good enough.