There was a version of ordinary that Aria had never believed was available to her.
Not the ordinary of other people — not the specific quiet domesticity that she had watched from a distance her whole life, the kind that seemed to belong to people whose parents hadn’t gambled away their stability, whose lives hadn’t been interrupted by crisis at regular intervals. That ordinary had always seemed like something that happened to other people. People with different histories. People whose foundations hadn’t shifted under them repeatedly enough that they’d stopped trusting foundations entirely.
This was different.
This was the ordinary that came after everything — after the hard thing and the harder thing and the thing that had seemed impossible and had turned out to be merely very difficult
