“Why were you at my office?” I question although a voice at the back of my head is screaming, what man?

My heart races and I have to stand up, I have to move. I can’t sit still any longer.

“Because I wanted to see you. And your boyfriend, don’t think I don’t know,” she adds.

“Are you stalking me?” I question, my voice hitching.

“You should stay away from him, Haley. He’s no good! A mother knows.”

No good? My heart drops. A mother knows?

“You know nothing and you don’t listen. You need to stop!” I tell her and my throat tightens at the last word. Tears prick my eyes. “You’re the one who said I was rotten, let me be by myself and leave me alone.

“But, Haley...” Her breath hitches on the other end of the line. I feel nothing in response. When I was a kid, I would have felt guilty for making her cry. I would have been desperate to help her feel better. Now I don’t feel any of that empathy, at least for her. If she wanted me to feel empathy towards her, she should have given some to me when I needed it most. “I love you. I’m your mother, and I⁠—”

“Don’t contact me again, or I’ll go to the judge. I’m not giving you any more chances.”

I hang up and drop my phone into my lap. It disappears into a fold in the blanket. My chest heaves as I try to steady my breath.

She loves me how she knows how. That part of these conversations—which I never want to have with my mother—is what makes me the most exhausted. My mother claims to love me, but she won’t listen to what I say. All it means is that she feels like I owe her a relationship.

I feel a flicker of hurt. I’m a little sorry for my mother. Not enough to ever want to speak to her again, but sorry that they got sucked in by those people at that school. My father left when I came back, and she was all I had. And I was all she had in many ways too.

The sorry feeling only lasts for a minute or two. Yes, my mother was lied to, but they also had to be the kind of people who would accept those lies. She never looked deeper into what happened at those kinds of places.

They called it a school, and men showed up in the middle of the night to arrest me. What kind of person lets that happen? What kind of mother hides in her bedroom and lets her daughter get dragged out of the house?

My mother, that’s who.