“Ma’am?

Are you alright?” The young man at the front desk had stepped forward, his voice gentle and careful.

His nametag read Marcus.

And something about being seen — genuinely seen, with concern, by a stranger in a navy blazer, when the people who claimed to love me had just gone upstairs without me — undid a knot I had been keeping tied for five years.

Standing there, I finally let myself count the whole tally I had spent half a decade refusing to add up.