I sat down on the cold floorboards in one of his old army shirts and wept until my chest felt hollow.

It was the truest grief I had let myself feel since the funeral — because for seven months I had been too busy defending myself from my own family to simply miss my husband.

That is perhaps the cruelest thing they took from me, in the end.

Not the bedroom.

Not the boxes.

The uninterrupted room to grieve the man I had lost, which they had filled, instead, with the daily work of resisting them.

Chapter 16 — The Answer My Sister Gave