Sixteen Years I Didn’t Speak to My Mother. Then I Went Missing, and From Her Sickbed She Said “Go Find Her”

And it meant that the story I had told myself, the one where she had written me off long ago and I was simply respecting her wishes by staying gone, was a lie I had built to make the staying-gone easier.

She had been asking about me every single day.

And I was about to become a mother myself, and I could not, in the end, bring my own daughter into the world without at least trying to close the distance to the woman who had asked about me every day for sixteen years.

Chapter 3 — Already Dead to You

I left Cypress Hollow at twenty, after an argument with my mother, Della, that neither of us ever managed to take back.

“You don’t want a family,” she had shouted at me that afternoon on the porch.