They had never forgotten me.

That was the thing I kept having to be told, because some scarred part of me had spent twenty years certain the forgetting only ran one direction.

They had spent their birthdays wondering about me exactly the way I’d spent mine wondering about them.

The reaching had never been one-sided.

We’d just none of us been allowed to reach far enough.

There’s a particular cruelty I understood only standing in that driveway, and it’s this: the system had spent our childhoods teaching each of us, separately, in four different towns, the exact same lie — that we were the only one still holding on, that the others had surely moved on and built new lives and let us go.