She had worked hard.

She had obeyed.

She had starved.

She had saved half a dinner roll for her dinner, and she had become one of the top students in her school while doing it, and I had spent those same five years berating her from hundreds of miles away, because I had chosen, every single time, to trust an adult’s voice over my own child’s.

“I thought,” Maya whispered against my jacket, “that you hated me.