Not out of cruelty and not out of principle.

Because there is nothing I want from that woman and nothing I owe her, and because the only people with business in this are six of them and none of them need me managing it.

That is the closest I have come to being finished with Maren Ostlund, and it is not the version I wanted at thirty-seven in a parking lot, which was a woman removed from the arithmetic entirely.

What I have instead is a letter in a drawer that I have now read, with one true sentence in it, and a garage with an empty box in it, and six daughters who each have a different mother and are, at last, allowed to.