Lena
"I think," he said carefully, "he decided you were choosing to stay."
I absorbed that.
Choosing to stay.
Not staying because I had nowhere to go, which was also true. Not staying because the contract required it or because my father had liquidated my trust fund and I had no resources to leave with, both of which were also true.
Choosing to stay.
I thought about the morning three weeks in when I'd woken up and walked to the garden and stood among my mother's roses with coffee and realized that the anxiety of the first two weeks, the constant low-grade alarm of a person in an unfamiliar territory, had reduced to something quieter. Not gone. But quieter.
I thought about the first time I'd pushed back on something Julian said, a minor disagreement about the charity beneficiary cate
