Being Rebecca’s daughter is not something you carry as a shame.

It is something you get to carry as a gift.” I said it slowly, and I made her look at me while I said it, because I had come to understand that this was the real repair work, more than canceling any wedding or hanging any photograph.

The wound Brenda had opened in my daughter was not really about a laundry room or a bedroom or a hidden picture.

It was a wound in how Hannah saw herself, a belief, planted deep, that she was a problem, an obstacle, a burden whose love for her own mother made her a nuisance to the people around her.