No shattering champagne glasses.

No cruel laughter under a chandelier.

Just the wind in the old trees, and the sound of hammers building something better than what had stood there before.

I thought, standing there, about all the years I had spent trying to earn the respect of people who were never going to give it, and about how much of my life I had organized around a family’s low opinion of me, and about how completely that opinion had turned out not to matter.

The Calloways had built their whole cruelty on a story about my smallness.