I lock it and I put the lights out and I go up the back stairs, past an armoire that stands fourteen inches out from a wall, and past a little room with a proper handle on it and four hundred of my father’s drawings inside it, and I go to bed in the north bedroom where the light comes in at seven.

And I do not lie there listening.

That is the whole of it.

That is what nineteen days, fourteen months and three lawyers eventually bought, and it is not vindication and it is not closure, and I have come to think that both of those are things people invented for the ends of stories.

What I got back is smaller and more useful.

I am a forty-five-year-old woman who sleeps in her father’s house, upstairs, in the dark, with the door locked, and does not lie awake working out which board on the landing makes a noise.