She was leaving.

She had a man and a plan and a bag.

Nothing I said in that doorway was going to change one thing about the fifteen years that followed.

They matter because they are the exact size of what I actually did, and for eleven years I told a story in which I did nothing at all and things were done to me, and a man who tells that story for eleven years to six children is teaching them something whether he means to or not.

By the time I understood that, my second daughter was twenty-four and had a whole architecture built on it.