Nobody suggested that a reasonable boundary was rude or unwelcoming.

The house was full of warmth, the ordinary human kind, freely given and freely received, and it required nothing of her that she had not chosen to give.

After the guests had gone, she stood alone in the warm foyer and looked around the house that had belonged to her father before it belonged to her.

And for the first time since inheriting it, she understood fully that legal ownership was not merely a line printed on a government record.

It was responsibility.