For a moment I just stood in the open doorway and breathed.

The air from outside was clean and cold and it smelled like nothing — no grease, no coffee gone bitter, no perfume of a house that measured a person by her use.

It smelled like the outside of that life, and I filled my lungs with it, and I understood that I had made the right choice with my whole body before my mind had even finished the argument.

A house you are meant to live in should not feel like a room you cannot breathe in.

I had spent fourteen hours in that house and I had not drawn one full breath, and I had told myself it was nerves, the strangeness of a new place, the ordinary adjustment of a bride.

It was not nerves.