Njal comes up behind me and folds his arms around me, chin on the top of my head.
I let my weight go back against the solid warm fact of him in a room with good light and a yard for my dog.
"You're allowed," he says into my hair. "Get used to it. There's going to be a lot of picking from here on out."
After we're back home, I get a text from my mother.
Of course it happens while I'm lying in bed and running the day back like a movie I don't want to end.
Sophia. Your father and I would like you to come for dinner. We have things we want to say to you. We were wrong and we know it and we'd like the chance to make it right. Please.
I read it over and over again.
I hold the phone a long time, thumb hovering, the yes half-typed in my head before I've decided anything.
Then I call Hannah because she's the only person alive who'd understand the size of what I'm holding.
"They want me to come to dinner," I tell her when she picks up. "To apologize. To make it right." My throat pulls tight. "And Han, I can feel myself starting to go. Not because I want to see them. Because I wasbuiltto go. Because years of church is in me telling me I have to forgive them, that I'm the hard one, the unchristian one, if I don't?—"
"Stop." Her voice is soft with a floor under it. "Breathe. I know that voice. I've got the same one. They installed it in both of us."
I breathe.
"Can I tell you what I learned?" she says. "The hard way, over a lot of years and a lot of therapy I paid for myself? Forgiveness and access aren't the same thing. You can forgive somebody in your own heart, on your own time, for your own peace—and still not hand them a seat back at your table. They're two differentdoors, Soph. They raised us to think they were the same one so we'd never close either."
The tears come, slow and quiet.
"They should have trusted me," I say. "That's the part I can't get past. Daddy didn't have to believe the lies. I told him they were fake, but he chose not to believe me. He looked at his own daughter and decided I was a child predator. And now the paper's printed the truth… now he wants to make it right." My voice splits down the middle. "Where was that when I needed him? Where were they when I was getting eggs thrown at me in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot?"
"I know, baby."
"Is it terrible that I don't want to go?"
"No." Not one second of hesitation in her. "It's not terrible, Sophie, it's the clearest you've sounded all year. Listen to me. I cut them off for five years to get well. Five fucking years. The church told me I was breaking a commandment, and Mama cried every time. I held the line anyway, because I knew the truth when nobody else would say it—that I couldnotheal in the same house as the people who broke me. And those years are the only reason I'm alive to be on this phone with you." A breath. "I'm not telling you to cut them off. That was my road. Now, I see them every once in a while and make a call every couple of weeks. Your road might run differently. I'm telling you that you get to choose. You don't owe them a dinner because they finally got brave enough to be sorry. You decide when, and whether, and on whose terms. And right now, you don’t have to walk back into that house to prove you're a good person. You already are one."
I lie in the dark and let her words settle.
"I'm not going to go." The words come out enormous and terrifying and clean. "Not now. Maybe not ever, I don't know yet. But not now. Not before I move. I'm not letting the last thing thathappens before I start my whole new life be them, in that house, telling me how sorry they are now that it's free."
"Then that's your answer," Hannah says. "And I'm proud of you. You did in two months what took me half my life."
After we hang up, I type something back to my mother.
I delete it. I type it again. It takes me the better part of an hour to get it down to the truth without the apology I don't owe.
I got your message. I believe you mean it, and I'm glad you know you were wrong. But I can't come to dinner. I need to put everything I've got into the life I'm building, and I can't do that looking backward right now. Maybe there's a version of us down the road. I hope there is. But it isn't this month, and it isn't that table. I love you. I'm okay. Better than okay. — Sophie
I read it once and send it before the old voice can get its hands on me.
Then I set the phone face-down on the nightstand and roll into the warm bulk of the man asleep beside me.
I lie there in the dark and don't wait for lightning.
I don't brace for the floor to open.
I don't fold myself down small to take up less room in a world that's about to punish me.
For the first time in my life, I told my parents no, and nothing came down out of the sky to make me pay for it.