We are a twenty-five-year-old engineer who still burns the rice, and two fierce ten-year-olds who are slowly learning to be kids again instead of survivors.
The nightmares come less often now.
Maya has started laughing with her whole body again, the way she did before, loud and unguarded.
Lily has filled three notebooks with stories, and she reads them to me at bedtime while I pretend I’m not falling asleep.
But we are a real one.
The trust money sits where my mother put it, untouched, waiting for the girls’ futures the way she intended.
I pay our ordinary bills with my ordinary salary, and I have never been prouder of anything.
Some nights, after the girls are finally asleep, I sit at the old kitchen table where my mother once warned me that people change when there’s money and no one watching.
I think about how close I came to handing her daughters to someone who saw them as an obstacle.
