I wrote to my mother that night.
Not my birth mother. My mother. The woman who had pressed money into my hands and watched me walk out of her house with one bag and had not tried to stop me because she understood, in the way she understood most things about me, that stopping me was not what I needed.
I sat at the small writing table in my room with a lamp burning beside me and I told her where I was. Not in precise detail, not the name of the kingdom or its location, because I did not yet know who might read a letter in transit and caution had become a habit I was not willing to drop. But I told her I was safe. That I was somewhere real, with real people, and that what she had told me in her letter had led me to something I was still trying to understand but that was beginning to feel, i
