My Daughter Said, “You’ll Eat After Everyone Else.” I Walked Out With The Roast.

 

Part One

My daughter said, “You’ll eat after everyone else.”

And something cracked inside me. No anger, no shouting—just a slow, clean break, the kind you hear in the dead of winter when frost splits old wood. I looked at the roast I’d spent five hours marinating and another three roasting. I looked at the table where everyone else sat. Then I picked up the tray, still hot, and I walked out the front door.

No one followed me. I didn’t even hear a gasp, just the dull scrape of forks against porcelain and a few children laughing—unaware of the moment that had just passed.

The air outside was crisp, colder than I expected. It helped. The tray was heavy, the foil thin against my fingers, but I didn’t stop. I walked the three blocks to my house with the roast in my arms, careful not to spill the juices that still bubbled at the bottom of the pan. Inside, everything smelled like lemon soap and dust. My house hadn’t been truly mine since Julia convinced me to move in with her last year. “It’ll be easier,” she’d said. “You won’t have to worry about bills. We’ll take care of you.”

I should have known better. Nothing is free in this world—not even your dignity.

I set the roast on my own kitchen counter. The silence wrapped around me like an old coat. No voices, no screens, no one asking where the cinnamon was or why the potatoes were lumpy. Just me and the ticking of the clock I hadn’t wound in weeks.

I made myself a plate—one of the old ones with blue flowers around the rim, chipped slightly at the edge. I served a thick slice of roast, spooned pan drippings over it, and sat down at my own table. I ate slowly. The meat was tender, the seasoning had taken perfectly. It might have been the best I’d ever made. No one complimented it. No one interrupted me. And for the first time in years, I tasted every bite.

When I was done, I washed the dish, dried it, and put it away. Then I sat in the chair by the window and watched the maple trees swaying in the wind. I used to rake those leaves every fall. Now Julia said it was too dangerous, said I might fall and break a hip—but she never asked if I wanted to. She only told. She’s always told.

“You’ll eat after everyone else.” As if I were some servant. As if decades of being her mother—feeding her, washing her, helping with her kids—meant nothing. She’s always had a way of speaking that sounds like she’s giving advice, even when she’s issuing orders.

The truth is, I knew this day was coming. It just took that one sentence to make me see it clearly.

I sat by that window for a long time, thinking of all the times I’d stayed quiet, all the times I’d told myself it wasn’t worth the fight—the eye rolls when I didn’t understand her dishwasher; the “Don’t wear that to the party; it’s old-fashioned”; the “You should start planning for the end,” as if I were a bruised pear nearing the compost bin. I thought of my other girl, Grace—gone ten years now—the gentle one, the tea-bringer, the caller-every-Sunday no matter how tired she was. She’d left me Rachel, though. Sweet, observant Rachel. Old enough now to see through the family’s masks. I wondered what she would have thought, seeing me leave.

And then I thought about myself: the girl I once was and the woman I’d become. I wasn’t bitter, just tired. Tired of living in someone else’s house. Tired of being spoken to like an obligation. Tired of pretending that being needed was the same as being loved.

I stood up, went to the pantry, and pulled out a pen and notepad. There were things I needed to do—not just today, but soon. My name was still on the deed to this house. My savings were still in my own account. I still had power. I had just forgotten it outside.

The phone rang twice that night, but I didn’t answer. The name—Julia—flashed and faded. She didn’t leave a message, just rang as if the sound alone might drag me back. It didn’t.

I slept better than I had in weeks. The kind of sleep that comes not from peace, but from a weight finally set down. I woke with the first light, as I always do, though there was no child to dress, no school run, no breakfast to lay out for people who barely look up from their phones.

I sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a slice of cold roast—now even more flavorful. I didn’t heat it. I didn’t fuss. I just ate it as it was, quietly, slowly, while the house held its breath around me.

By eight, I’d made a list: check the bank accounts, call the lawyer, go through the documents Julia helped reorganize last spring, make decisions. The list wasn’t long, but it was real, and it was mine.

I pulled the folder labeled House & Finances from the bookshelf and spread papers across the table. Renovation receipts I’d paid for. Utility bills always in Julia’s name. Notes in her tidy slanted script: We should streamline this—meaning shift control, slowly, imperceptibly, out of my hands. I remembered the day she convinced me to add her to one checking account “just for emergencies.” I’d thought I was being practical.

That’s how they get you, isn’t it? They don’t take everything at once. They chip away until you don’t recognize what used to be yours.

I opened my email and reset the bank password—thankfully, the security questions were still the ones I’d chosen long ago. There it was: my balance, intact, mine. I made a note to go in person. I wanted eyes to look into, not just screens. I wanted printed records, authorization forms reviewed. No more joint accounts, no more access “for convenience.” Just me, my name, my signature.

It wasn’t revenge. It was clarity.

On the fridge hung one of the few photos I hadn’t packed away when I moved: Grace and me, standing in the garden, Rachel between us, no more than seven or eight, hands full of basil she’d yanked triumphantly from the planter. We were laughing—all three of us—not posing, not performing. Laughing like people who found joy in the same moment for the same reason.

I hadn’t laughed like that in a long time.

I dialed Rachel’s number from memory. “Grandma,” she answered, warm light poured through wire.

“Hi, sweetheart.”

“Are you okay?” she asked, her voice immediately alert. “Mom came back to the table last night looking… empty.”

“Something did happen,” I said. “I remembered I’m still alive.”

Rachel exhaled, then laughed once. “Well. Good.”

“I left,” I said simply. “I took the roast and I left.”

Silence. Then: “Good for you.”

“Would you like to come by sometime?” I asked. “I’ll make lunch.”

“Tomorrow,” she said, quick as a match flaring. “If that’s okay.”

“Tomorrow would be lovely.”

After we hung up, I walked through the house slowly. The curtains I’d sewn myself before Julia was born. The chipped ceramic lamp I refused to replace. The bookshelf full of paperbacks no one borrowed anymore because everyone reads on screens. Everything had a place. Everything held weight. I dusted. I polished. I opened windows. The house exhaled with me.

At noon, I went to the raised beds out back. The soil was dry but not hopeless. The parsley still held fast. A few stubborn marigolds hung their yellow heads, summer’s last bells. I touched the wooden edge of the bed and let my fingers rest there. Julia had told me not to bother with the garden anymore. It’s too much for you, Mom. Just let it go. She didn’t understand. You don’t let go of the things that remind you who you are. You water them—even if your hands shake, even if your knees complain, even if no one else notices.

Grace used to say I was the strongest woman she knew. She’d say it when I fixed the washing machine myself, or when I held Walter’s hand as he took his last breath, or when I went to work three days after the funeral because someone had to keep the lights on. Funny how that strength becomes invisible the older you get. You stop being the woman who carried the family on her back and become the woman people talk over. The one they pat on the hand. The one they tell to rest.

After Walter died, I didn’t crumble. I cooked, I cleaned, I paid the mortgage, I worked late shifts. Julia was twenty-one—diploma still shiny, restlessness coiled like a spring. Grace, still in high school, stayed close. She always had one foot in the real world, never too swept up in ambition to forget who raised her. Julia had drive, no doubt; Grace had heart.

“I need to help you,” Julia kept telling me after the funeral. But her help always came with a plan I hadn’t made. When she moved out a month later, she said the house felt too heavy. She needed air. Grace stayed. She worked part-time after school and made me laugh when the nights got too long. I’d find her on the porch, talking to the stars like they were old friends who kept better secrets than people.

When cancer came for her a decade later, she faced it the way she faced everything—gently, with her eyes open. She called me before every chemo appointment, not because she needed advice but because she knew I needed to hear her voice. When she died, Julia said, “You have to be strong now for Rachel.” But her voice didn’t hold me; it assigned me.

Rachel was twelve when she moved in with Julia, because I was “too old” to raise a teenager. I wanted to fight it—to say I could still be a mother even if my knees ached and my hands trembled some mornings. I didn’t. I let it happen. Maybe that was the first real surrender—not to age, but to doubt.

The years after passed in a blur of compromises. I sold my car. You don’t need it anymore, Mom. We’ll take you anywhere you need to go. Except they rarely did. I stopped hosting dinners. It’s easier at our place. I stopped gardening. Your back can’t handle that. I stopped decorating for holidays. Let us do it. You rest.

Practicality is a sharp knife. You only notice how deep it cut when you reach for something and find it’s no longer yours.

Julia isn’t cruel—not in the ways people expect cruelty to look. She doesn’t raise her voice. She doesn’t hit. Her tools are silence, suggestion, dismissal. If I said something hurt me, she’d blink and say, “Oh, I didn’t mean it that way.” As if my pain were a translation error.

That’s what made last night different. You’ll eat after everyone else, she said—not with malice; with efficiency. With coldness so practiced it passed for logic. I wasn’t part of the celebration. I was part of the staff.

So I took the roast and left.

Rachel arrived the next morning with pastries from the little place near the bookstore. We sat at the kitchen table, warm cinnamon twists between us. She poured tea the way she’d seen me do a hundred times. She didn’t ask questions at first, and I didn’t hurry to explain. We ate slowly like we had time.

“I saw Mom’s face last night,” she said finally. “When she came back to the table, she looked hollow. She didn’t think you’d actually go.”

“Neither did I,” I said. “Until I did.”

“I’m glad you did.” She stared at her pastry, then up at me. “I wanted to say something, but—”

“It wasn’t your fight,” I said. “And yet here you are.”

“She’s not a bad person,” Rachel said, voice soft. “But she treats you like a favor she’s doing for the universe. Like she expects applause for letting you exist in her house.”

“It sounds harsh because it’s precise,” I said. “Precision often feels impolite.”

She reached into her bag and pulled out a set of keys on a bright pink cover. “I made copies,” she said. “For emergencies. And also… so I can come over whenever. If you want.”

I weighed them in my palm. “Do I get a say in the keychain?”

“Absolutely not,” she grinned.

We talked about her job at the library, a neighbor’s opinionated cat named Clementine, the plant on her windowsill that refused to die. When she left, I stood at the door and watched her turn the corner. Then I slipped the keys into the drawer with my old recipe cards and a flashlight that still worked.

I felt… not alone. Contained. Like I’d stepped back into a shape that had always been mine.

By noon I’d showered, dressed, and walked to the bus stop with my worn leather bag. The bank branch was only two stops away. The teller—Kevin—couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. He was polite, tentative, bracing for either tears or confusion. I gave him neither.

“I’d like to remove an authorized user from two accounts,” I said.

Ten minutes later I was in a small office signing forms with steady hands. “Would you like to revoke online access permissions as well?” Kevin asked.

“Yes. And cancel all automatic transfers.”

“There’s a recurring $450 to a school tuition account,” he said delicately.

“I know,” I said. “Cancel it.”

He scrolled. “There are also smaller ones. Subscriptions, home services, ride share—”

“I don’t recognize them. Cancel everything.”

He hesitated. “Would you like us to flag the account in case someone attempts to reestablish access without consent?”

I held his eyes. “Yes.”

When we were done, he walked me to the door. “Anything else I can do?”

“You already have,” I said.

From the bank, I went to Mr. Abrams’s office—the lawyer who had helped Walter and me draft our wills long ago. Lemon polish, old paper, new receptionist. He rose when I entered and took my hand in both of his. “Evelyn,” he said, “it’s been too long.”

“I need to revise my will,” I said, “and set up a trust for my granddaughter.”

He blinked once, then nodded. “Of course.”

“Everything goes to Rachel,” I said, “not to Julia.”

“We can do that.”

“I also want a living trust,” I added. “I want the house and accounts under it while I’m alive—my control, her as beneficiary. And revoke any financial power of attorney naming Julia.”

He nodded as he wrote. “You’re not punishing, Evelyn,” he said after I explained. “You’re protecting. There’s a difference.”

We signed a week later. He slipped a thick binder across the desk. “Keep this safe. Let Rachel know where it is,” he said.

“I already wrote her a letter,” I said. “Instructions. Names to call. What to do if and when.”

“Good.”

Outside, the wind smelled like rain. I walked past the pharmacy, the bakery, the small park. I sat on a bench under a tree and listened to the leaves. My phone buzzed. “Everything okay, Grandma?” Rachel texted.

“It’s starting to be,” I wrote back.

That afternoon I cooked a pot of lentil soup just for myself. Not a vat. A pot. I ate it from a real bowl with a slice of buttered toast and felt both extravagant and ordinary. After, I pulled out a box of letters. Grace had written paper letters even after texts took over the world. “Ink tells the truth,” she said. I reread one about Rachel’s first piano recital and one listing small gratitudes: a new mug, a rainstorm that broke the heat, a stranger who held the door at the clinic. Then the harder one—the scan that showed the cancer had spread. “I’m not afraid of dying,” she wrote. “I’m afraid of being forgotten.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” I said quietly. “I never will.”

I wrote a letter to Rachel that evening. Not an apology, not a complaint—just a memory she’d been too small to hold: the summer I taught her to make pie crust; her flour-dusted serious face; my joke about butter being the secret to life. “You were always paying attention,” I wrote. “I see that now. I just want you to know: so was I.”

When I sealed the envelope, the doorbell rang. Toby shuffled on the porch, long limbs, eyes on his sneakers. “Mom made me bring this,” he said, thrusting a bag toward me. “Food. And a card.”

“Do you want to come in?” I asked.

He hovered in the hallway, awkward in the way boys are when they’re taller than their feelings. He looked around. “It smells like… real,” he said.

“That’s the onions,” I smiled.

We talked about his math teacher, his broken skateboard, the band he liked that sounded “retro” (his word) and like noise (mine). Then he asked, “Are we still family?”

“Always,” I said. “Family and boundaries aren’t enemies. You’re allowed to say no to people you love.”

“Oh,” he said, like a light turning on behind his eyes. Before he left he hugged me—quick and clumsy—and I held him a second longer than he expected.

The card in the bag was elegant, unsigned, one word embossed in gold: Sorry. It wasn’t enough. I wasn’t waiting for it to be.

Three days later, a pale blue envelope arrived. Julia’s handwriting. “Let’s start fresh,” it read. “Come for dinner. Sunday. Just us.” I put it back in the envelope and slid it into the drawer with takeout menus and rubber bands. When Sunday came, I made myself roasted carrots, a piece of fish, rice with lemon zest. Around seven, the phone rang.

“Are you punishing me?” Julia asked when I answered.

“No,” I said. “I’m declining.”

“I’m trying to make things right.”

“You’re trying to reset the board to what’s comfortable for you,” I said. “I’m not playing anymore.”

She was quiet, then smaller. “I miss you.”

“I believe you,” I said. “But I won’t go back. I won’t sit at a table where I’m asked to earn my place.”

“You think you’re better than us now?”

“No,” I said. “I think I finally remember I matter.”

She ended the call quietly, like a door that doesn’t know who opened it.

Later, I tore the blue card in half and put on the radio. Jazz crackled through the kitchen. In my socks, alone, I swayed—knees protesting, heart agreeing.

I slept like a woman who had come home after years of visiting.

 

Part Two

I signed the lease on a Tuesday. A small apartment—two rooms and a kitchen—on the second floor of a quiet building near the park. The windows faced east. The light poured in like honey every morning. That mattered more than granite countertops or “amenities.”

Mr. Patel, the landlord, carried boxes up the narrow stairs and showed me the breaker panel “just in case.” When I asked if I could paint the cabinets, he said, “As long as you don’t pick black, I trust you.”

I picked sage green.

Rachel helped me settle in. We unpacked slowly, iced tea sweating rings onto the table, laughter bubbling up when we found things I didn’t remember owning. She hung a small framed print above the sink—a lemon tree, soft and faded. “It looks like you,” she said. “Rooted, but still growing.”

“That’s nicer than being called ‘hardy’,” I said.

We arranged books, tucked Grace’s letters into a wooden box on the side table, close enough to touch. Before she left, Rachel put a trailing pothos on the windowsill. “Every woman needs a plant,” she said. “Proof you can still nurture something.”

On my first morning there, Ruth from 2C knocked with a cane covered in floral stickers. “You’re the new one,” she said, eyeing me like a shopkeeper does a fresh shipment. “Trash out after five. Don’t feed the squirrels. Mr. Duncan in 3A will flirt. Let him.”

We stood in the hallway trading common sense and conspiracies. When she leaned in and asked, “Divorced?” I said, “Widowed.”

“What brings you here then?” she asked.

“I remembered I’m allowed to live on my own terms,” I said.

“Well,” she said, satisfied, “it’s about time.”

I made soup my first night—mushroom and onion, thyme and patience. Two bowls, not twelve. I ate at the table, from a real bowl, with bread warm from the oven down the street. No one asked why there weren’t more sides. No one criticized the softness of the yolk at lunch the next day. The silence didn’t press; it made room.

The phone filled with noise I did not let in. Missed calls stacked like playing cards. Voicemails rehearsed sincerity. A text from Julia’s husband—Alan—appeared, wrung in careful punctuation: We’re concerned. Can we meet to discuss…the accounts? I didn’t answer. I wasn’t an ATM. I was a person.

Rachel came over one Friday evening with mushrooms and tiny onions. “Soup?” she asked, and I laughed because she is my granddaughter. We worked in comfort—she peeled, I rinsed, we teased Julia gently because love allows small deflations. At the table, she tasted the first spoonful and closed her eyes. “It’s yours,” she said. “That’s the difference.”

“Do you think I’ll end up like her?” she asked as we washed dishes.

“No,” I said. “You already asked the question she never could.”

Two weeks into the new place, a letter arrived in looping cursive: Helen Carter. Thirty years fell away as I unfolded thick paper at my kitchen table. She remembered Grace’s chalk inventions and my 40th birthday, when it had rained and I’d danced barefoot in the back yard. If the world’s already wet, I’d told her, you may as well move with it. Helen wrote about twin boys, a new hip, and a dog that refused to heel. “I hope you’ve kept dancing,” she ended. “If not, it’s never too late.”

I put on the crackly old stereo Rachel had saved from my garage sale years ago. Nina Simone filled the room. I swayed, just a little. The floor creaked its approval.

Julia tried again, but by mail, then text, then Toby. When he came with a paper bag and an apology he hadn’t written, he asked a small brave question: “Are we still family?” I told him yes and explained that boundaries and love weren’t enemies. He hugged me quickly, like a boy practicing being a man, and left a little taller.

The binder lived in the bottom drawer with the emergency flashlight. I rarely looked at it. It didn’t represent anger. It represented a spine. One afternoon, I slid it out and tucked a new letter inside: instructions for Rachel if and when. What I have is yours. Not because of blood, but because of kindness. You never tried to manage me. You met me where I stood. That’s love. That’s legacy. Don’t let anyone teach you otherwise.

Life, the small kind, filled in the rest: Ruth tapped her cane against my doorframe every Thursday to trade soup for lemon bars; Mr. Duncan at the post office called me “kid” and charged me 50 cents too little because he said the computer gets confused; the woman in 2B did, in fact, feed squirrels and winked as if we hadn’t seen.

In late winter, the church bulletin asked for volunteers to teach basic cooking at the community center. “Seniors sharing skills,” the flyer said. The phrase made me itch and smile. I signed up. The center’s kitchen had dull knives and a stove with two temperaments—sleeping or wildfire. The first night, six women and one man showed up, all of us pretending we were there to learn soup and not company.

We made bread that had to be kneaded with laughter. I told them about resting dough, about patience and timing. One woman—Tanya—said she’d never baked anything not from a box. “The trick isn’t the recipe,” I told her. “It’s believing you can fix it if it goes wrong.”

Five weeks later, she brought in cinnamon rolls so perfect they made everyone humble. “I couldn’t have done it without you,” she said, and I pointed to her hands. “You did this.”

On the way home that night, under a sky that had finally stopped hurting, I passed Julia’s street. Lights glowed behind crisp curtains. I didn’t turn in. Some roads you choose not to walk, and that choosing is a kind of walking.

Spring arrived like forgiveness—gradual, stingy at first, then suddenly generous. I ordered a small raised bed for the balcony. Mr. Patel grumbled about soil weight and then installed it himself and pretended I didn’t see. Rachel and I planted parsley, thyme, and tiny lettuce that looked like miracles. Every morning, I took my tea outside and checked on leaves that did not hurry and yet became themselves.

It was at the community center, rinsing beans in a colander older than two of my students, when I felt eyes on me. I turned and saw Julia in the doorway—no makeup, no armor, clutching her purse like a shield. Behind her stood Rachel, hands folded, not quite blocking, not quite ushering.

“Mom,” Julia said, small.

“Hello,” I said, neutral.

“I… I’m not here to talk about money,” she blurted. “Or access. Or the accounts.” She laughed without humor. “I rehearsed that line in the car. It felt silly once I said it.”

I put the colander down. “Why are you here?”

“I’m… I’m lost,” she said, a crack in her voice I hadn’t heard since she was 21 and the world first told her no. “I keep thinking if I control the right things, I won’t have to feel things. And then I go home and everything is quiet, but not peaceful. And I… I realized the only time I felt… safe… lately was when Toby came back from your house smelling like onions and talking about how your place smells like real.”

“Onions,” I nodded.

She smiled, brief and honest. “Onions.” She looked down. “I’m sorry,” she said. No gold trim, no expectations, just ink. “Not for a night. For a decade.”

“For telling me when to eat,” I said.

“For telling you how to be,” she answered.

I waited. Apologies are seeds; you shouldn’t water them if you’re not ready to have a tree.

“I’m not asking you to come back,” she said. “I’m asking how to be your daughter without being your manager.”

“Ask me things,” I said simply. “And accept the answers.”

She nodded. Her eyes were wet, and for once she didn’t blink them dry. Behind her, Rachel leaned against the doorframe and smiled like a person who had been holding their breath for a long time and had just decided to take air in again.

The center’s clock ticked. Soup bubbled. Outside, somewhere, a child yelled joy like it was news.

“Come Sunday,” I said. “If you want. I’m making roast.”

She laughed and cried at the same time and wiped her face with the back of her hand like she was eight. “Do I have to eat after everyone else?” she asked, wry.

“You’ll eat when the food is warm,” I said. “And you’ll help set the table.”

“Yes, ma’am,” she whispered.

Sunday, the apartment filled with the sound of a small life widening: a pan sizzling, a radio mumbling jazz, Rachel arguing with Toby about which side of the sink is best for soapy water. Ruth brought lemon bars, scolded me for not saving her a window seat, and took it anyway.

Julia stood in the kitchen doorway, unsure where to land. I handed her a stack of plates. “Table,” I said. She nodded and turned, and for once there was no sigh, no instruction, no hissed correction. She set plates at even intervals, adjusted a fork once, and let it be imperfect.

We ate together. No waiting games. The roast was tender. The onions were honest. Someone—Toby—told a joke that made me snort. Jazz curled its way through conversation like a cat.

At the end of the meal, Julia cleared her throat. “Thank you,” she said. It was addressed to the room, to me, to a version of herself that was trying.

“Good,” I said. It was addressed to the same.

After they left, after dishes were washed and Ruth’s cane thumped back down the hallway, after Rachel slipped the lemon tree print into a better frame (“It deserved more dignity,” she said), I stood at the sink, hands in warm water, and felt the strangest thing: stillness that didn’t mean emptiness. Space that didn’t mean loss.

I dried my hands and sat by the window. The maple across the way had first buds—small, almost imperceptible freckles of green where there had been nothing but brown a week ago. I thought of Grace’s letter: I’m not afraid of dying. I’m afraid of being forgotten.

“I remember you,” I said to the lemon sky, to Grace, to the girl who danced in the rain at forty. I remembered like a promise, not a punishment.

The phone buzzed. A text from Julia: What’s your pie recipe? Rachel says butter is the secret to life.

Half a cup cold. Don’t overwork the dough, I typed. Then, before I could talk myself out of it: Come by next Sunday. We’ll make it together.

The three dots appeared. Stopped. Started. Okay, she wrote. I’ll bring apples. And… onions. For real.

I laughed out loud in an empty room that wasn’t empty at all.

A year from the night I carried the roast down the street, I cooked another—smaller, the right size for the table I owned. Rachel chopped onions. Julia zested lemons. Toby dried plates. Ruth critiqued my gravy and then asked for seconds. We ate while the roast was warm. We ate while the windows silvered with rain. We ate without running tally sheets of who owed whom.

When the plates were clean and the radio hummed a song I knew by heart, I wrote one more letter—the kind you tuck into a binder and hope someone finds at the right time. It was addressed to the woman who might someday sit at this table after I’m gone. It was addressed to me.

You were not a burden. You were a life. When they forgot, you remembered. You took the roast and left. You came home. That is the story.

I sealed it, slid it beneath the will, and closed the binder. Then I took a seat at my own table, poured tea, and listened to the soft thunder of rain and the low contented murmur of people I love setting a kitchen to rights.

There was nothing to prove. There was only this: soup simmering, a plant turning its leaves toward the light, a door locked from the inside out of choice, a woman who walked out and then, finally, walked in.

END!