It took everything in me to focus, to stay grounded in my body as the doctor came into the room and flipped through my chart. His voice was gentle, but the weight of his questions hit me like a wall.
“Do you feel safe at home?”
I didn’t hesitate.
“No,” I told him. “I don’t feel safe with them at all.”
That was all it took. That’s how I ended up here—living away from my family, placed with people my parents called their “friends,” people who smiled with too many teeth and moved with the same unnerving grace Michael did.
It should’ve brought comfort—familiarity, maybe. But instead, it terrified me.
I remember the first time I heard one of them say the word mate. It came from the husband, and I had frozen right where I stood. The word felt like a ghost. Like a wound I had tried to forge
