I spent most of my life as a small thing.

That is the plain truth of it.

I let myself be sanded down and set aside, and I called it love, and I very nearly went out of the world without ever once objecting, a piece of furniture in a house that had forgotten me.

And then a man said a cruel true thing behind a green curtain, and it broke me open, and in the breaking I got out — got out with just enough time to remember that I had been, all along, under the dust and the accommodation and the twenty-two years of yes, a whole and particular person named Henrietta Cardiff, who liked her coffee a certain way and read greedily by a window and taught hundreds of children the thing that opens every other thing.

I got her back.

Not for long.