So we’re done paying it.” There was a long silence on the line.

Then my father, who had never once in my life said such a thing, said that he was proud of me, and that he was sorry, and that he should have burned it all down himself a long time ago and spared us both.

I told him it wasn’t too late to be free of it.

And it wasn’t.

That was the strange gift underneath the catastrophe: the fall that looked, on television, like the end of my family was in fact the first day none of us had to be afraid anymore.

Chapter 18 — Sennett’s Gambit