I keep walking into the darkness, hoping it will blind me to my own mistakes. But . . .

I had been so young. My mother had been sleeping with a married man. She sought to destroy a family, and then they told me that when she didn’t get her way she killed the man she loved. To my unworldly mind, every sin was a gateway to another. So my mother had cheated . . . and that sin led to the sin of murder. It was a simple, well-packaged idea. One that was so easy for a ten-year-old to understand and accept.

My mother was the only family I had. She had been my world, my teacher, my comforter, and my role model. When the boys teased me at school about my bookwormish tendencies or the frilly dresses I insisted on wearing, I would run home and she would kiss the tears away. When I was with her she made me feel safe. She had been the only person on this earth who loved me. And when the hardships of poverty had crushed down on us, her love had been enough to keep me smiling. It was enough to keep me believing in the richness of our possibilities.

Yet I believed them when they told me that with one violent act she had taken all that away. My feelings about it at the time were ridiculously simple:

She abandoned me.

And that was a betrayal.

The alley stretches out in front of me. The name of a now-defunct business is painted in white on a dirty glass window. You can barely make out the lettering in the dim lighting, but it’s there—these ghosts of the past are always there when you take the time to look.

By twelve I was skipping school. I lashed out at any foster family stupid enough to take me in. When they gave up on me, I took satisfaction in it, allowing their rejection to reinforce my rapidly forming worldview. I threw away the moral teachings that my mother had handed down to me, feeling that every good word she had uttered was now corrupted. I didn’t stop reading, but when I opened a book I did it in secret, under the covers with a flashlight, hiding my intellectual curiosity the way other kids hide alcohol and drugs.

When I turned thirteen . . . well, that’s when I started dating. I made it my mission to only choose boys my mother would hate, letting them touch me in forbidden places just to make a point.

I did occasionally visit her—usually because one of my series of foster parents insisted. I would sit across from her, picking at my nail polish as she tried to give me parental advice under the eyes of her keepers, guards who were amused and appreciative of the disrespect I paid to their prisoner.

I called my mother a whore once, and the guard later gave me a lollipop.