“I’m selling it.”

I remember how steady my own voice sounded, saying it, and how the steadiness surprised me.

Three days postpartum, locked in the rain, hung up on by my husband, I might have expected to hear my voice shake.

It did not.

Because the decision, once I let myself make it, was not a decision at all, really; it was simply the truth of the situation, spoken aloud.

Ethan and his family had treated my house as a weapon — as a thing they could use to control me, to remind me of my place, to lock me out of when I displeased them.