They had been the whole weather of my life for five years, and once I walked out into the sun they simply stopped being the weather at all.

I had expected the freedom to feel like triumph.

It did not.

Triumph is a thing you feel about an opponent, and to feel it I would have had to keep them in my mind as opponents, which would have been its own kind of prison — a life spent tending the memory of people who did not deserve the room.

What I felt instead, once the noise died down, was something quieter and much larger: an enormous, spreading absence where all that endurance used to be.

For five years a part of me had been permanently occupied — braced, managing, calculating how to keep the peace, running a background process of fear that never fully shut off.