What was actually mine fit in the back of my brother’s truck with room to spare, and the smallness of it, rather than shaming me, felt like a kind of freedom.

I was not weighed down.

I could go.

Everything essential, my daughter, my clothes, myself, could be picked up and carried out to somewhere better in a single afternoon, and everything I left behind, I discovered as I looked at it one last time, I did not want anyway.

Chapter 23 — The Video Call

At three o’clock that afternoon, my phone rang with a video call from Liam, and after a moment’s consideration, I answered it.

His face appeared on the screen, disheveled and furious, and almost before it had finished loading he swung the camera around to show me the half-emptied living room.