The third song was “Midnight Train to Georgia” by Gladys Knight and the Pips. I really used to love this song until Patrick and I went to South Carolina to visit my family. Afterward, the song became a painful reminder of every awful thing that had happened to us during that trip.
During that time, Patrick and I had recently purchased our condo. He’d met my parents and two of my six siblings (my sisters Andrea and Charlotte) when they’d visited Chicago, but he’d never been to my home state of South Carolina until that trip. Everything had been fine at first. Andrea, one of my younger sisters, had picked us up from the airport and drove us to my parents’ house, where my mother and father greeted Patrick warmly. But later that evening, during a barbeque my parents hosted in the backyard, my
