A person can share your last name and your household and be nothing but a parasite; a person can be bound to you by law and treat you as furniture.

What actually makes a family is not the paperwork but the thing wholly absent from that house for three years: respect.

Dignity.

The honoring of boundaries.

The basic, reciprocal decency of people who value one another rather than merely use one another.

By the true definition — the only one that matters — Marguerite and Bristol and even Trevor had never been my family at all.