He had put my mother in that role and forced her to live it, on her knees, for two years.

And now she moved through the same house as its center rather than its servant, the person for whom the flowers were arranged and the terrace was built and the whole warm ordered life of the place existed.

Nothing about the house had fundamentally changed; it was the same walls, the same rooms, the same patio.

What had changed was who it belonged to, in fact and in feeling, and that change was written in the way she walked through it now, unhurried, at ease, a woman entirely at home.

He had tried to make her a servant in her own house.