When they were out of sight, I turned and looked out over the quiet gold woods, and I let myself take a full accounting of what had happened to me, the way I take account of everything.

Setting a firm boundary had not destroyed my family, as they had all warned me it would.

It had only exposed a family that had been rotten for years — a dynamic that had run, the entire time, on my endless submission, on my willingness to pay and pay and never say the word no without an apology stapled to it.

Jason had lost a wife, in the end, because he had treated my trust as a free and inexhaustible resource, and no resource is inexhaustible, not even a good woman’s patience.

Evelyn had lost her influence because she had confused being a mother with being owed.

And I — I had lost a great deal too, and I will not pretend otherwise.