It was no longer just an address, or an investment, or a sanctuary in the abstract.

After everything, after all of it, it was, finally and fully and forever, home.

I have kept the house, of course.

I did not sell it and move my mother somewhere new, somewhere without the memory of the basement, though people suggested it, though there might have been a certain logic to a fresh start in a place unhaunted by what had happened.

But I understood, thinking it over, that to sell the house would have been to let the cruelty win a final small victory, to concede that the basement had ruined the home, that what my sister did had permanently poisoned the sanctuary I built.