That was when I realized I had spent Christmas Eve exactly where I belonged. I just hadn’t been allowed to believe that home could be somewhere else. The people around me didn’t care about making my career smaller or explaining why it didn’t fit their idea of me. They simply made room. For once, I didn’t have to earn my place at the table by pretending to be less than I was.

Dad drove out the next morning on freshly plowed roads. He stood at the gate holding a visitor pass, but he had no prepared speech. Finally, he admitted he had been afraid of looking small beside my life, so he had tried to make my life smaller instead. He didn’t ask me to forgive him. I told him I had spent twenty years being quietly proud of him, and all I had ever needed was for him to be proud of me out loud, just once. He nodded again and again.