I reclaimed the name.

I loved my sister out loud in the time I had left, and let her love me back without mistaking it for disappearing.

Set those on the scale against twenty-two years of vanishing, and the little handful of months outweighs the decades, because weight was never about how long.

It was about how true.

Chapter 16 — Henrietta Cardiff

I am writing this near the end, in the chair by the window that gets the morning, with the botanical gardens going green outside and my sister asleep in the next room and my own name on the papers on the table, and I find that I am not sad, or not only sad, which is more than I ever thought I would be able to say.