Just a place to start, which was enough.

I noticed that my mother had changed, in the smallest way, and I made myself notice it rather than rush past it — because I have learned to distrust both my instinct to punish forever and my old instinct to forgive too fast, and the truth usually lives in the uncomfortable middle.

She did not come the second time to be forgiven.

She came knowing she might not be, and she came anyway, and she let Samantha set the terms of a room in her own daughter-in-law’s house.

That is not nothing.

It is not everything, either, and I did not pretend it was.