Becky
I read the headline standing in the kitchen with a mug of coffee going cold in my hands, the same way I'd read every previous headline, though this one landed differently than the fabricated arrest record had, precisely because none of it was actually false.
The eviction. The collections debt. The two jobs I'd worked simultaneously without either employer knowing, breaking rules I hadn't had the luxury of following if I wanted to keep Micah fed and housed during the hardest stretch of those early years. All of it true, all of it stripped of context, all of it reassembled into a narrative that made survival look like scandal.
"This one's worse," I said quietly, when Adrian found me still standing there twenty minutes later, the coffee fully cold now, untouched. "Not because it's mo
