A year earlier, I would have rejected the comparison. I would have remembered myself standing in the rain, exhausted and humiliated, pressing numbers into a keypad that no longer recognized me.
But courage, I had learned, did not always look like strength when it began.
Sometimes it looked like a woman holding a newborn in the rain.
Sometimes it sounded like two quiet words spoken into a phone.
Sometimes it meant refusing to sign.
Sometimes it meant opening a door for a child whom other people had tried to hide.
So I kissed Willa’s hair.
“Maybe we both had to learn.”
People later asked me when my life truly changed.
They expected me to say it was the morning the agents entered the house, or the day my marriage ended, or the afternoon the sign for Sofia House went up beside the gate.
But they were wrong.
My life changed on a cold November night when my husband locked me out of a house he believed he could quietly take from me.
