Someone Had to Stay

Brenda’s blunt little sentence cleared all of that away.

I was not imagining it.

The imbalance was real, and it was not an accident or a phase, it was the plan, stated openly, unashamedly, in a hospital waiting room.

Hazel was mine to figure out.

Liam was to be protected.

That was the arrangement, and it had been the arrangement all along, and everyone in his family had known it but me.

A cruel clarity is still clarity.