You begin to think: maybe it is just a chair, maybe I am making it bigger than it needs to be, maybe my grief is disproportionate, maybe I am the unreasonable one.

That is what had happened to Marisol, degree by degree, over years — not that her family had taken her father’s chair, but that they had taken her right to decide for herself what its loss weighed.

They had appointed themselves the assessors of her own heart, and she had let them, until she could no longer tell whether her pain was real or excessive, whether her objections were justified or merely dramatic.

Getting the chair back broke the spell, because it forced her to feel, unmediated, undiminished, how much it had always mattered — and to understand that it had mattered that much the entire time, and that every voice telling her it was small had been wrong, and that she had believed them anyway.