It was an ordinary evening in the nursery.
Ethan was healthy, laughing at something Claire was doing beside his crib.
Sunlight came through the new curtains.
Claire’s bruises had faded.
She caught me watching them.
“What?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Nothing.”
But it wasn’t nothing.
For eight months, I had imagined coming home to my family.
The homecoming I got was nothing like the one I expected.
Still, standing there with Claire safe and Ethan laughing between us, I finally understood that home was never the deed Margaret wanted, the accounts she tried to control or the rooms she occupied while I was gone.
Home was the people she had tried to make powerless.
And they were standing beside me again.
