I shake my head back and forth to deflect the sound. I cup my ears and tuck my chin. I hear a high-pitched eeeeeeee noise and realize it is me. I am sobbing into my oversized shirt. I hate this story that is us. I hate it more than the story I have been telling myself for the last ten years. In my story, there was one person in the entire world I could trust, and that person died. But in this story, I am not even left with that much. In my story, I am unwanted. It is painful, but it is what I know. It makes its own kind of sense. In this story, I am over-wanted. I know how to be the abandoned girl with the crazy mom. I do not know how to be the stolen girl with the manipulative grandmother.

“But you were better! You said so yourself. How could she stop you?”

“I was young and alone and scared. I had every reason to believe her,” she says. “And regardless of what people think, mothers aren’t always awarded custody. Especially when there is a history and another alternative within the family.”

I see how tightly her hands are gripping the steering wheel. “Did she give you a reason? Did she say how she would keep you from taking me back?”

Her eyes slide to me and then back to the road. “She just said she would tell them things about me. Things I did when I was sick.”

“What things?”

“I don’t know, Cat. I don’t remember much from before my time in the hospital. It got pretty bad. What I do recall is…well, it’s hard to separate fact from fiction.”

They say that the body stores trauma the way a computer stores information. That the memories are downloaded into our cells, hardwired into our very DNA. They say we never actually forget anything, but that the brain holds on to every detail of every moment of our lives, filing it away into recesses we can’t reach. I don’t know if she really means it, if she truly can’t recall, but I know that it is inside of her—the things bipolar disorder made her do. I know those traumas are part of her, part of me.

“You said that you only got better for a time.” Maybe it was for the best, what Moony did. Maybe she knew that another episode was inevitable.