I carried the tea to the window and sat and drank it slowly, watching the rain move across the glass, and it was only tea, and it was mine, and nothing about it was waiting to hurt me.

Small reclamations are still reclamations.

That is most of what healing turned out to be — taking back one ordinary thing at a time until the life around me was mine again and not a place I was only pretending to survive.

For a long time I believed the lesson of that night was that I had to learn to suspect everyone.

In the end I understood it was something else entirely.