“I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” And I understood that this was the true homecoming, not the apartment, not the gardens — the name.

Because a name is the handle you have on your own self, the word the world uses to call you toward it, and for twenty-two years I had answered to a name that had come, over the years, to mean the one who takes care of things, and now I answered, again, to the one that meant simply me. Henrietta Cardiff.

I said it to myself in the mirror like a woman learning a language she had spoken fluently as a child.

It came back fast.

Your own name always does.

I do not think you can understand, unless it has happened to you, how much of a self lives inside a name.