That night I packed what would fit into one old suitcase and left the big house in Upper Arlington that had never, I would learn, been legally mine at all.

I rented a damp basement apartment in Franklinton, a working-class stretch of the city where the rent was low and no one asked questions, and I sat on the bare floor of it and cried until I couldn’t get a full breath.

I want to describe that floor, because I came back to it later in my mind so many times — the cold of it through my clothes, the water stain spreading brown across one corner of the ceiling, the single window at sidewalk height where I could watch the feet of strangers pass.

I had gone, in a day, from a mansion to a basement, from a mother to a woman her own child had disowned in open court.

I did not think it could get worse than that floor.

I was wrong about that, and I was wrong about nearly everything else too, but I didn’t know it yet.