Grandma, Dad and Mom are different now.

They’re home more. They don’t yell about money anymore. Dad smells like cardboard boxes, but he plays board games with me on Sundays.

Are you really coming back?”

“I’ll be there in three weeks, Maya,” I smiled, wiping a tear. “And I have forty-one postcards to show you.”

When I finally stepped off at the Port of Miami in late April, the humidity hit me like a familiar damp blanket. But I wasn’t the hunched, exhausted woman who’d fled in the dark twelve months earlier.

I’d walked ancient ruins, navigated foreign train systems alone, and learned to sit in a café for hours enjoying my own company.