Chapter 2
That night I ran. Not far — just to the park, a swing that squeaked, hands going numb around the chains. A police officer found me at five in the morning, curled near the playground. My parents arrived furious, not worried.
Two days later, they packed a suitcase and sent me to live with my uncle Ray and aunt Nina in the countryside.
"You've proven, time and again, that you're not capable," my father said, face flat. "We have another child to focus on."
Maya hugged me so hard my ribs hurt. "I'll talk to you," she whispered. "I swear."
They didn't let her ride with us.
Uncle Ray and Aunt Nina raised me the way you raise something you actually want. Dinner table conversations that didn't end in comparison. Art supplies instead of test prep. Aunt Nina hung my drawings on the refrigerator the way other families hung report cards. I went to a state art school on scholarship, built a freelance illustration career that eventually became a studio with four employees and clients who paid real money for the thing my parents had once called a waste of time.
Maya kept her promise, mostly. Calls on birthdays. A few visits, always brief, always slightly nervous, like she was smuggling contraband. Our parents never knew about most of them.
I did not speak to my parents again until Uncle Ray's funeral, eighteen years after they drove away from that driveway.
It was a formal gathering — not quite a wake, more the kind of restrained, catered memorial my parents would have organized for Ray even though they had barely spoken to him in a decade, because appearances mattered to them in death the way they had in everything else. The living room was full of relatives I barely recognized, and a coffee table with framed photographs — including, I noticed immediately, several of Maya and me as children that I knew for a fact had not included me in my parents' version of our family history for a very long time.
My mother reached toward me the moment I walked in. "Please, Elena. This is still your family."
May you like
I looked at the photographs on the table. I looked at her.
"You sent me away when I was twelve because I wasn't the daughter you wanted," I said.
