They had been my dependents, my exploiters, my tenants in a house they treated as a right.

My family, it turned out, was a category I had been keeping empty by giving its name to people who did not deserve it.

And clearing the house did not leave me with less family.

It left me, for the first time in years, with room to build a real one.

Chapter 20 — I Reclaimed My Life

I took a slow breath of the warm evening air and looked out over the sunlit hills, and I let myself name, plainly, what I had actually won.