It felt more like a defect, a thing wrong with me, an inability to accept what everyone else had accepted and move forward the way the healthy and the sensible were supposed to.

The people who loved me treated it as a symptom to be managed.

Even I, in my lowest hours, wondered whether the refusal to let go was just grief wearing the mask of suspicion.

But it would not go out, that small stubborn flame, through six years of everyone’s gentle encouragement to extinguish it, and in the end it was the truest thing in me, and it was right, and it led us home.

Chapter 7 — The Only Explanation They Had