“My whole life,” she told me, “someone else has made my choices.

My aunt decided where I lived and who I would marry.

You protect me because you love me.

But this, I need to do standing on my own two feet.” And I let her, because she was right, and because the whole point of everything we had been through was that she got to make her own choices now.

When she came home, she told me Delilah had looked her in the eye at the end and offered no apology — had said only that the land should always have been hers, that Naomi had stolen everything.

“And I realized something, standing there,” Vivienne said quietly.