You restore it by filling it, patiently and deliberately, day after ordinary day, with so much light that the darkness becomes only one small chapter in a long and mostly luminous story.

My mother lives in that house still, in the sunlit room on the main floor, with her husband’s bracelet on her wrist and her pearls safe in their box and the cherry tree blooming outside her window every spring.

It is the house I bought from ten thousand miles away, out of a love I was never sure she understood.

She understood.

And it is, at last, exactly what I built it to be.

Not a rental.

Not an investment.

Not a war.