The agreement requires them to pay $1,100 every month for twenty-one years. That means Priscilla will still be making payments to her mother when she is sixty-three. I know she resents me for it. Perhaps she always will. But resentment is a price I can live with. For five years, I had been told I was being given a roof over my head while I quietly paid for the roof, the heating, the water, and nearly everything underneath it. The repayment schedule simply put the truth onto paper.

Elliott started coming to my apartment on Thursdays. He was seventeen now, taller than his father, and had developed the habit of doing his homework at my kitchen table while eating everything in my refrigerator. I never complained. One evening, he asked me what Everett had been like. I talked for two hours. He didn’t interrupt once. He simply listened, and somehow that felt like being given back a piece of a life I thought everyone had forgotten.

Priscilla came once in February. She stood in my doorway for several minutes, clearly trying to say something. An apology never came. Instead, she looked past me and quietly said, “The tea is still in the cupboard at home.” It was such a strange sentence that I almost laughed. But I understood what she meant. It was probably the closest thing to an apology she knew how to offer. I told her she could leave it there. Neither of us pretended the past had disappeared.

I think often about that supermarket line when I was seventy-five, holding a box of chamomile tea in my cart. I had spent years believing people could make me invisible simply by treating my sacrifices as obligations. But they couldn’t. Not without my cooperation. The moment I stopped signing things that erased me, everything changed. I didn’t take the house. I didn’t destroy my family. I simply stopped giving away my life for free. And for the first time, the signature at the bottom of the page belonged entirely to me.