Not guilt.
I want to be precise about that, because guilt was the emotion they had spent three decades installing in me, the reliable lever they reached for whenever the account needed refilling, and I had finally disconnected it.
This was something else.
It was the plain grief of seeing, clearly and without illusion, that the parents I had spent my whole life trying to earn my way toward simply were not able to love me the way I had needed them to — that it was not a matter of my not having given enough, that there had never been an amount that would have worked, because the door I kept trying to buy my way through did not, in fact, have a room behind it.
That is a sad thing to know.
It is also, strangely, a merciful one.
You can stop knocking on a door once you finally understand there is nothing on the other side.
The knocking is what had been breaking my hand all along.
I closed the heavy door, and I turned the deadbolt, and I listened to it slide home with a sound like the most satisfying sentence ever spoken.
Chapter 16 — The Weather Holds