She looked so vastly different from the still, small figure I had found on that rusted cot that, some mornings, walking into this room, I had to stop in the doorway and simply take her in, and let the relief of it wash over me all over again.

She was here.

She was safe.

She was mine to care for now, in the house I had bought for exactly this, and no one would ever again put her in a basement and call it care.

I have become Some mornings, in those first weeks after she came home, my mother did not fully remember what had happened to her, and I was grateful for that mercy.

The mind protects itself, sometimes, from the things it cannot bear, and my mother’s had drawn a soft veil over the worst of the basement, so that she did not carry the full conscious weight of the months she had spent drugged and hidden.