Outside, the ocean moved in and out, the same sound it had made for seven years of her inhabiting this house and for all the years before that when it inhabited itself. Eleanor had read once that the Atlantic at the shoreline was never the same water twice, that what appeared to be a fixed and constant thing was in fact in constant motion, always arriving and always leaving, always the same ocean and never the same water. She had thought about that often over the years and she thought about it now, standing at the kitchen sink looking through the screen door at the dark water catching what light the sky offered.
The house was hers again. It had been hers all along, of course. That had never been the question. The question had been whether she would insist on it, whether she would bring herself to occupy the space she had built and paid for and earned without apology or equivocation, without the thinning of herself that came from trying to be generous to people who mistook her generosity for weakness.
She had insisted. She had occupied it.