My mother knew before I ever told Sebastian I was carrying his child, someone had already handed her a reason to let him go. I didn’t sleep that night.
I just lay there on my back in the dark, staring at the ceiling, letting the truth settle over me. No fighting it, no trying to organize it into neat little boxes, just letting it land. My mother, a forged document, a man who had decided how everyone else’s story would end before they even realized they were part of the game.
She was gone. Two years now, whatever she had thought, whatever reasons she had given herself for staying quiet, whatever love had kept her from speaking up until the very end, that had all disappeared with her.
I would never get to ask her why. I would never hear her voice explaining it. All I had left was the outl
