To be narrated out of your own life while you’re still living it is to be treated as furniture already promised to the movers.

I let myself have the twenty minutes.

I have found that grief, like water, does less damage when you give it somewhere to go.

And then I stood up, because I had a daughter who needed a mother with a plan and not a mother on a floor, and because the studio around me — every drawing, every sample, every hard-won account — was proof that I was a woman fully capable of building something real, and it was time I remembered it.

Chapter 6 — Four Days

“I need Anwen to stay with you for four days,” I said, and my voice came out level, almost pleasant.