And Lenore found, reading it, that she wasn’t hurt in the way she’d expected to be.

She was simply, finally, free of the hope — the small, persistent, exhausting hope she’d carried for eight years — that if she was only patient enough, only useful enough, only quiet enough, this family would one day turn and see her and ask, at last, how she was.

They were never going to ask.

Knowing it, all the way down, was not the wound she’d feared.

It was the thing that let her set the whole family down and walk, at last, out of a house she’d been standing outside of the entire time she lived in it.

Chapter 24 — The Kitchen, Again