Not for anything I’d done.
They’d div*rced the year before, and they had simply… moved on, and I didn’t fit in either of the new lives they were building.
My father married the woman he’d ch*ated with and built himself what he actually called, out loud, a “real family.”
My mother married a man who announced from the start that he didn’t want “extra kids,” and after my half-sister was born, I watched the last of my mother’s attention drain toward the baby and away from me.
One night I sat on the stairs and listened to the grown-ups in the kitchen argue about who “had” to take me.
“She doesn’t even fit in here,” my stepmother said.
“I can’t handle two kids,” my mother said softly.
They were discussing me the way you discuss a piece of furniture nobody has room for.
A few days later, my mother sat me down at the kitchen table with her hands shaking.
