My mother had spent six years reading it, correctly, as love.

I stood in that hallway and wept, quietly, with relief, because the one doubt I had never been able to resolve on my own had just been resolved, gently, by the person best positioned to know the answer.”

Chapter 26 — Finally Home

Not even when it was dark.

I have carried those words with me every day since, because of everything they told me, all at once, quietly, in a sunlit room.

They told me that my mother, in the long, drugged dark of that basement, in the fog my sister had manufactured around her mind, had not entirely lost herself.