Easy to remember the voices at night, the creaks on the stair, as universal aspects of a childhood rather than moments rooted in time. A night when two women came together in the dark.

They knew, inasmuch as any five- or six- or twelve-year-old can ever really know, the core untruth that crouched amid the litter of their childhoods. Knew the totality of their father’s power was always less than he might have wished it.

“Do you think,” she says, “the problem was Dad, or did we just use it as an excuse for everything?”

I feel embarrassed that his decisions are still governing the way I behave.”

There are, she has often felt, no answers to inheritance, to the slick black suckered thing that at once shoves you up and drags you inward.

She hadn’t pictured so much tiredness, so much bickering and scrapping, or the many little nicks and insincerities that amount to a normal sort of life.

A feeling out of nowhere, longing like a kick in the stomach: to be anything to anyone.

She stared at the finial tip from the window and thought of the shape things take in water, the way forms appear less certain when pushed beneath the surface, outlines growing lesser, growing loose.

Patients come to her to talk about feelings of inadequacy stemming from an unsatisfactory homelife, about generational trauma and buried emotions and displaced panic at the thought of the end of the world. None of it incorrect, exactly, but it can sometimes be difficult to tell what they need her for, if they’ve already figured this out.