I couldn’t speak. The familiarity with which she said Mom to refer to a person she once knew, where in my mind’s eye there was only a feminine shadow, an idea of a person, unsettled me so deeply I didn’t know how to respond.

‘You were her leech.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘While you were in her. Sucked out all her blood. Made her weaker and weaker and weaker so that when she finally pushed you out, all fat with her guts, there wasn’t enough left for her and it killed her, and you moved all her organs around inside her and those came out too. You’re a parasite, like a leech.’

I cried then, quietly, because this was so disturbing, and of course she wouldn’t lie about Mom, about her dying, about the guts bursting forth from her like red glistening worms.

‘I’m just letting you know. I’d want to know too, if it were me.’

‘No, Celeste –’

‘Oh, pull it together.’

Or maybe she could. Lie, that is. Of course she could, I realized. Yes, it all made sense now: ‘You’re lying.’

I didn’t have time to flinch before she reeled back her hand and sent it flying down across my face.

One of the worst things that happened as a result of this was how these things lingered. Scars – physical ones – I can attribute to her, as a result of things she’d done. But parts of me have been shaped – are being shaped – in an unnatural way, a trajectory initiated and seen through by Celeste, even in her absence, because of her absence. Were these traits natural or branded? I don’t know if I dress in the uncaring way I do because I like how it looks, or because I don’t want to be seen. I’m not sure if in second grade I’d bitten Dave Frederik until he bled when he pulled my hair because I didn’t like being touched, or because Celeste made me fear other people’s hands. I wasn’t sure if I barely spoke because I didn’t want to or because she’d taken my voice.

I can’t answer and that, in and of itself, has changed me too.

And all of this is why I struggle to assign a quality to that memory, a feeling to that day – the day Celeste slipped into the dense wood and never came back out.