I had been gone so long from anything decent that decency itself felt, at first, almost too bright to look at.\n\nTwo days later I resumed the divorce with my lawyer.

My parents owned a small, charming boutique hotel up near Duluth, and my mother put her foot down that I would come back into the family business.

“One day this will all be yours,” she told me.

“It’s long past time you built a life that belongs to you.” I began working the front desk in the mornings and taking business courses at night, and slowly, a day at a time, I remembered that I was a person, and not only a set of chores wearing someone’s name.

Chapter 19 — The Exit Door