“I’m better than alright,” I murmured, and a real smile touched my lips for the first time in longer than I could remember.

“I’m free.” And I want to be precise about what I meant by that word, because it was not only freedom from a criminal investigation, or freedom from my parents’ control, though it was both of those.

It was a deeper freedom, the freedom of a person who has finally set down a burden she carried so long she had forgotten she was carrying it.

For twenty-eight years I had carried the weight of my family’s approval, or rather the weight of chasing it, the endless exhausting labor of trying to be enough for people who had decided in advance that I never would be.