“No, sweetheart,” I said, and I put my arm around him.

“We’re going to do something much more interesting.” I did not yet know exactly what shape it would take.

But I knew, watching my husband’s car turn out of our street, that the version of my life in which I dug the potatoes had just ended, and that whatever came next, my children and I were not going to spend it as anyone’s unpaid labor ever again.

Chapter 8 — Declined

I was not there to see the front desk, of course.

But I have heard it reconstructed enough times, from enough directions, that I can tell it to you almost as if I had been.