Chapter 8: The Ashes and the Light
I didn’t return to the condo in the Annex. My mother packed me into her car and drove me home to Kingston.
On my first evening home, she helped me out to the back porch. We sat side-by-side in the gathering dusk, watching the fireflies. She held my hand in the dark without uttering a single word. I looked past the garden, down the street where the dark expanse of the lake caught the dying embers of the sunset.
It was enough.
There are truths I hold in my bones now that I could never have named four years ago. I know now that the women who are most thoroughly eroded in this world are often the ones most fiercely committed to keeping the peace. We convince ourselves that maintaining peace is an act of love, even when the cost is our own survival.
I know that a fever that nearly takes your life can also be a crucible. If you survive the flames, it burns away everything that was never actually holding you together in the first place.
They thought a jar of cream and a web of lies could break me. They miscalculated one vital thing.
Breaking me was never the same as finishing me. Tomorrow, I will drive up to my father’s cottage in Muskoka. I will sit on the dock that tilts slightly to the left. And I will rebuild my life, entirely, unyieldingly, mine.
