Which choice best describes Maren's overall emotional response to returning to her grandmother's house, as presented in Passage A?

Passage A

The porch steps still creaked on the third one from the top, exactly where they always had, and Maren stood there a moment before going any further, letting that single small fact settle over her like a held breath finally released. Twenty-two years. She had expected the house to feel smaller, the way childhood places always did to adults returning to them, some trick of memory inflating everything to a scale only a six-year-old's eyes could have believed. But the porch felt, if anything, larger than she remembered, wider somehow, as though it had been waiting patiently for someone to stand on it again and take up its proper amount of space.

Inside, her grandmother's chair was gone, replaced by something newer and considerably less interesting to look at, and Maren felt the absence of it the way you feel a missing tooth, an emptiness the tongue keeps returning to out of habit rather than hope. The new owners, a young couple with a baby asleep somewhere upstairs, had been generous enough to let her wander through on her own for a few minutes, an old woman's request they had clearly found more touching than strange.

She did not cry, though she had half expected to. What she felt instead was something closer to recognition, the specific, almost physical sensation of a place confirming that it had, in fact, existed all along, that the version of her childhood she carried around had not been invented or exaggerated by the passage of time. The kitchen still caught the afternoon light at the same low angle across the same worn floorboards. Someone had painted over the pencil marks on the doorframe where her grandmother had measured her every summer, but Maren could still make out the faint shadow of them beneath the paint if she tilted her head just right, and that was enough. She had not come back expecting the house to have stayed the same. She had come back to confirm that she herself had not entirely changed, and standing in that kitchen, she found she mostly had not.

Passage B

The apartment building where I had spent the first twelve years of my life had been repainted a shade of blue I found aggressively, almost personally, wrong, and I stood across the street for several minutes simply staring at it, trying to locate the building I remembered somewhere underneath this unfamiliar color. I had flown eleven hours and driven another two specifically to stand on this sidewalk, and now that I was here, I was no longer entirely sure what I had expected to happen.

The corner store where I used to buy candy after school was a different business entirely now, something involving phones and their accessories, and the specific tree I used to climb, a tree I could have sworn was enormous, had either been removed or had simply never been as large as I remembered, because the tree standing roughly where I thought it should be looked ordinary, unremarkable, entirely unclimbable in my current memory of the attempt. I found myself doing math I did not want to do: had I genuinely climbed that tree, or had I simply wanted to have climbed it badly enough that the memory had assembled itself sometime later, built from wanting rather than from anything that had actually happened.

This was the part no one had adequately warned me about. I had braced myself for the building looking different, for strangers living behind my old windows, for the ordinary erosions of time. What I had not braced for was the specific vertigo of not being able to fully trust my own memory of the place, of wondering how much of my childhood I had constructed rather than simply recalled. I got back in the car sooner than I had planned, no longer certain the trip had answered anything, and increasingly certain it had raised a question I was not sure I wanted answered: how much of what I thought I knew about my own past was memory, and how much of it was simply a story I had been telling myself for so long that the two had become impossible to tell apart.