That last piece of knowledge was the most expensive and the most durable, and I would not trade it back for all the easy evenings it cost me, because a truth you paid for in full is a truth that stays bought.

Chapter 22 — A Year, Give or Take

A year passed, give or take a season.

I had expected the aftermath of a thing like that to be loud and ongoing, a running war of texts and ultimatums, and some of it was.

But most of the real change happened in silence, in the slow settling of a family into a shape it had been forced to try and then, to its own surprise, found it could live in.

I measured it the way you measure any recovery — not in grand milestones but in the small absence of things that used to hurt.