He hadn’t touched me in two years, and he was still costing me eleven thousand dollars a year.

I drove home. I did not pull into the church parking lot.

I sat in my own driveway for twenty minutes with the engine off, and then I went inside and made dinner and asked Nolan about the science fair, and it wasn’t until eleven o’clock that night, standing in the hallway with a laundry basket on my hip, that I stopped in front of the frame.

MY MOM MAKES OUR SMALL HOME FEEL LIKE THE WHOLE WORLD.

Blue marker, faded, a child’s blocky capitals. The moon above it.

“That’s not the whole world anymore,” I said out loud, to nobody. “That’s just a hallway.”