The very child Beatrice had spent three years treating as a guest, as an outsider, as barely family, now held the key to the family’s door.

Literally.

She was the one who would decide whether her grandmother was welcome in our lives at all.

I have thought often about the elegance of what Caleb chose, and about why the key, of all things, was the object that made his mother scream.

It was not a threat.

It was not a legal weapon in any frightening sense.

It was simply a man exercising the most ordinary right there is, the right to decide who may enter his own home.