I refused to concede that.

So we stayed, and we transformed the house room by room, and we filled it with light and lavender and the smell of coffee and the sound of my mother’s laughter, until the memory of the dark was not erased, because it should not be erased, but was surrounded, outnumbered, overwhelmed by years of ordinary good days.

That, I have come to believe, is the truest kind of restoration.

You do not restore a home that has known darkness by pretending the darkness never came.