It turns out that a person who has lost everything, and been abandoned in the losing, becomes very difficult to move, and very hard to fool, and impossible to control.

The comfortable, accommodating, hoping woman I had been was gone.

In her place, forged in six months of solitary grief, was someone who could stand in a dark foyer holding a stack of legal documents while her father pounded on the door, and feel nothing but a cold, quiet certainty about what came next.

My family had left me alone with my grief, believing they were punishing me.

They did not understand that they had, instead, left me alone to become someone they could no longer touch.