It was just that the thing that changed was not what I feared.

What changed was that I learned, in the most vivid way a person can learn anything, how spectacularly my own fear could deceive me, and that a shut door between me and my mother-in-law was about to be thrown open for good, and that a Sunday ritual was about to be born that would become one of the great quiet joys of my life.

I felt the weight of the coming moment correctly.

I read its meaning entirely backwards.