I had spent forty-two years being a person shaped entirely around avoiding my mother’s displeasure, and I had assumed that person was simply who I was, permanent as bone.

It was not.

It was a set of survival responses to a danger that no longer existed.

And the danger was gone now — I had made it gone, with a recording and a court order and a locked door I controlled — which meant that for the first time in my life I was allowed to find out who I might have been without her thumb on the scale.

I am still finding out.

It is slow, and it is not always comfortable, and there are days the old reflexes fire at nothing.