When the delivery workers returned the reading chair to her father’s study, Marisol sat down in it and cried.

She did not cry because a piece of furniture mattered more than a marriage.

She cried because the chair was where her father had sat every morning for twenty years with his coffee and his newspaper, and because for two years she had believed it was gone, given away by a woman who found it outdated, with the shrugging permission of a husband who said furniture wasn’t worth fighting over.

And she cried, most of all, because getting it back forced her to feel the full weight of how long she had let other people decide which of her losses were too small to defend.