Saying no cost me an unfaithful marriage, and a house full of painful secrets, and a family I now understand I never truly had.

But saying yes would have cost me my soul.

And I have never once, in all the good and quiet years since, regretted the price.

I want to end on what that word actually means, soul, because it is easy to let it become a flourish, and it was not a flourish to me on that floor; it was precise.

What they were asking me to sign away was not, in the end, only my property.

Property can be lost and rebuilt; I know, because I lost nearly everything else and rebuilt it.