Not one more day.

Not one more hour.

I have thought a great deal since about that small act, throwing the scrub brush across the yard, and why it mattered so much to me to do it before I did anything else, before the lawyer, before the police, before any of the machinery that would eventually set everything right.

It was not practical.

It changed nothing about the legal situation.

But my mother had knelt on that stone for two years with that brush in her hand, and I needed her to see, physically, with her own eyes, an object of her servitude leave her hand and fly away into the grass, thrown by her daughter.