I took a long sip of my coffee.

I watched my healthy, laughing, living daughter chase her puppy across a lawn that no one could take from her.

And somewhere underneath the peace of it, steady and permanent, I carried the memory of a little boy I never met, whose real name is in the record now, whose death was not erased — because I had refused, when it would have been so much easier not to, to let it be.

I pulled Brucie into my arms when she came running up breathless, and I held her, and I smiled into the bright, hard-won, unbought freedom of the life we had left.

People ask me, sometimes, whether I am at peace now, and I have learned to answer honestly, which is: mostly, and not entirely, and that the not entirely is the right amount.

I am at peace about Luke, and about Celina, and about the marriage and the money and the years I lost inside a lie about my own worth; all of that has been set down, and it does not weigh on me anymore.