“Can we bring him home, Mom?” she asked, looking up with more light in her face than I’d seen in a year. “Somebody gave up on him, like they gave up on Max.

He shouldn’t have to wait here.”

We signed the papers that afternoon and brought Barnaby home, where he claimed a bed of his own beside Max’s and decided, within a day, that Lia was his.

That evening Colin and I sat on the back porch while both dogs snored in the grass and Lia dozed against my shoulder. My in-laws had done real damage — to my daughter, to my marriage’s idea of itself, to a gentle old dog who’d only ever helped people.

But the damage was what finally gave us the nerve to walk out from under their control for good.

A home, I decided that night, isn’t the house with the biggest table or the finest china. It’s wherever nobody has to earn the right to be safe.