It does not end love; it makes love possible on honest terms.

I did not understand that for most of my life.

I had always thought of boundaries as a kind of coldness, a withdrawal, the opposite of family feeling, and so I had resisted setting them, believing that love meant endless accommodation, endless tolerance, endless turning of the other cheek.

Caleb taught me otherwise, and Chloe’s brass key taught me otherwise.

A boundary is not the end of a relationship; it is the condition that allows a relationship to be safe enough to survive.