“I know this must be hard for you to understand, Marin, but I didn’t die. Your father told me to leave and never come back. It was what was best for you and your sister. It took a long time before I was ready to face you again. I needed to be clean before you saw me. But it finally happened. I’m sober!”

Was she expecting my congratulations? She’d left me to raise the baby that ended up sold on the side of the road for a wallet full of hundreds. And now, a decade and a half later I was supposed to throw a party for the neglectful bitch.

“You dare come back into my life after what you did to me? I was traumatized! Bennett and I had a damn memorial for you at Dad’s gravestone, to which no one came, by the way. That’s how beloved you were—no one even cared that you were fake dead.”

“Honey, I’m sorry for that. But at the time, I was as good as dead if I didn’t get space.”

“Space? Space is doing a few months in rehab. It’s not disappearing and pretending to be dead for, oh, I dunno, a decade and a half. Do you know I blamed myself for killing you? I blamed myself that my sister was taken away, that our family was broken apart. All because of you. Get out of my house! Get out of my life!” My screams pulsed through me, buzzing from deep in my gut, up through my lungs.

And yet Mom just stood there, arms open as if a hug could make everything better like when I was three years old.

“Can we at least talk?” she asked, stepping toward me.

“Stay away from me!” I swung my arms out, vodka and rage pumping through me as my hand made contact with her face, then her chest.

The abrupt impact of bone on bone jolted my body backward and I felt the earth shift and slip under me. My arms circled like a cartoon character as I fell, then a sharp thwack crushed my skull. I blinked, but it wasn’t a blink. It was nothingness.

**

I couldn’t remember how I ended up on the dingy linoleum floor where flakes of dried food collected hairballs along the baseboard, or whose blood blossomed beside my head. Although it was bright—too bright—I could vaguely make out the details of the kitchen through the blur. The scene slowly focused, one piece at a time. The metal-rimmed counter with the dented corner. The fridge humming like an angry bee.