The tears welled up and balanced on the ridge of Leah’s eyelashes. She felt so alone. She didn’t want to go to her mother, but she got out of bed just the same, and went out into the hall. She could see the light shining in the study where her mother was working on her book. Slowly, reluctantly, she made her way toward the door, holding herself tight, being so careful with each step not to make noise.

When she got to the door, she stopped, holding her breath. She didn’t want to knock. She didn’t want to say anything. She was trying so hard not to cry that her eyes felt like they would explode. What she really wished was that her mom would have come to her bedroom to check on her and realized that she needed a hug. But that hadn’t happened. It hardly ever did.

A fresh, bitter feeling of despair pressed down on her as she heard her mother crying on the other side of the door. Leah could tell she was trying not to make noise as she did it, just as Leah was trying not to make noise as the tears spilled down her own cheeks.

As she leaned back against the wall for support, she pulled the bottom of her T-shirt up and covered her face with it, and cried into it.

She couldn’t go to her mother. Her mother had her own grief, her own guilt, her own struggle to deal with her feelings. Leah wouldn’t add the weight of her own pain to her mother’s.

She wished she could, but she couldn’t.

Instead, she tiptoed carefully back to her room, where she grabbed a pillow off the bed to muffle her sobs as she curled into the upholstered chair by the window and let the emotions go.

She sobbed for herself, for her loneliness, for the feelings that she wasn’t important, that she didn’t matter. She sobbed in grief for the father she had lost and for the sister who had left her alone. She sobbed in grief and in pain and in anger. The emotions were so huge and overwhelming she felt both crushed by them and stuffed with them. The pressure came from within and without, inescapable. She didn’t know what to do with it. She thought—as she had thought many times before—that she might die from it.

Desperate to put a stop to it, she threw the pillow aside and opened the drawer in her nightstand where she kept a paperback book she had been pretending to read for almost two years now. She grabbed the book and went into her bathroom, where she pulled down her pajama bottoms and sat down on the edge of the bathtub.