It happened the way trust actually happens, not in a single decision but in the slow accumulation of a person proving, over and over, that they will still be there tomorrow — until one day you look up and realize you have stopped bracing, that you have not scanned for the exits in weeks, that the door you kept your face closed against your entire life has quietly, at last, been left open, and nothing bad has come through it.

Only her.

Only my mother, every day, staying.

Chapter 31 — Forged in Steel

I learned, over those months, that the blood in my veins had not come from nothing after all.

It is a strange thing to be handed an origin at twenty-eight, after a lifetime of blank spaces on every form.