To know Shivana did not want me, to know this would be the first time one of them had had the choice, but did not want me, injured my fragile heart though it had not even fully formed yet. Not being wanted was a new revelation to me, a condition I could not comprehend so I could not tolerate—at least not from the one who created me in the first place. I had to make her change her mind. Not because of my own selfishness, vanity, or greed. Not because of an elusive joie de vivre that I could not have felt yet, because I had never lived. And certainly not because I craved the life that awaited if Shivana Golding was going to be my mother: an uncomfortable future of tension, misery, obstacles, and want. Very little satisfaction or resolution. Forget relaxation. To be born into a world like hers was to hit the ground running in a marathon with no thin white finish line to stretch your heart out wide to.

What I wished was that she could see and know where I had been before I had found her. She needed to know the power of options, what the availability of choice signified, the freedom of making a mistake and correcting it yourself, rather than having others decide the proper remedy for you. But we could not communicate. The most obvious approach was to attack her conscience; I hadn’t yet thought about giving her love. So without the ability to put sound to thought to create a voice, my only weapon was our dreams. But my thoughts were not as pronounced yet, not as potent to persist, to reach the depth necessary to tell a full tale. I was restricted to the bits and pieces, the surface details too searing in a mind to ever evaporate, no matter how much time passed.

The shallow depth of Mississippi swamp water and the taste of nut caramel. Rope burn. The unforgettable pinch of a dying loved one’s hand wound tight about another’s wrist, like an expensive bracelet impossible to part with once its tightness cuts the circulation.

One night these memories brought me back to the second one—Darlene.