She wasn’t family or a neighbor in any official sense. But she was something else entirely.
She was the one adult who had ever looked at me as if I weren’t a problem to be solved or a burden to be ignored.
“She left instructions to contact you.”
When I was a child, my world was all sharp edges and cold silences.
My mom, Erica, was caught in a revolving door of boyfriends who either left or stayed too long. My stepdad, Dave, treated yelling as if it were his second job.
I got good at disappearing. At not asking. At never needing anything, not even food.
School wasn’t a safe place either. Poverty clings to kids like smoke.
I got good at disappearing.
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