It carried her.

It carried the person I had been before I ever met Ethan, the person his family had spent two years trying to make me forget I was.

Leaving the sofas and taking the piano was, in miniature, the whole of what I was doing that week: sorting, cleanly and finally, the things that were only things from the things that were actually mine — mine in the deep sense, the sense that has nothing to do with deeds or prices, the sense of what holds your history and your self.

The furniture stayed, because it was theirs to lose.