I sat down heavily on the edge of the bare mattress, surrounded by the scattered bags, and I tried, without much success, to slow my racing heart.

Chapter 14 — The Locked Closet

Sitting there on the mattress, waiting, my mind went back again, all the way back, to the thing that I think was really driving all of this: my own mother, and a locked closet, and a twelve-year-old girl in Ohio.

My mother had been, in her own quiet and complicated way, a keeper of secrets, and the secret I found when I was twelve, behind a closet door she always kept locked, had rearranged how I understood her.

I will not lay the whole of it out here, both because it is her story more than mine and because the details are not the point.