And Truett Rennick had come back, in the end, in part because of me — because a biological tie he had abandoned had pulled at whatever passed for a soul in him.

I was, without ever knowing it, a thread in the middle of all of it.

I cannot describe what it did to me to finally have this answer, because I had stopped believing there was one.

A child raised in coldness does not experience it as a mystery to be solved; she experiences it as a verdict on herself.

Somewhere very young I had concluded that I was simply unlovable — that there was something wrong with me at the root, some flaw my mother could see and I could not, because why else would a mother be warm to one daughter and winter to the other.

I had spent thirty-five years managing that verdict.