I felt, sitting there, something I had not expected to feel so soon: not grief, and not triumph, but a wide, quiet relief, the relief of a person who has finally set down a heavy thing she had been carrying so long she’d stopped noticing its weight.

I was flying home to an empty house and a daughter at my sister’s and a life I would have to rebuild from the studs.

And I could not wait to start.

Chapter 15 — The Reckoning

It did not happen in a single dramatic afternoon, the way people imagine these things.

It happened the way real reckonings do — slowly, in paper, over months.