When I Was Four, My Mother Left Me Alone in a Church—Twenty Years Later She Returned Crying, “We Need You”

By evening, I had stopped saying:

“They’re coming back.”

By the following morning, other people had stopped pretending they believed it.

My parents had disappeared.

And for a long time afterward, I believed they had taken my brother because there was something about him worth keeping and something about me worth leaving behind.

I was wrong about the second part.

It took another woman many years to teach me that.

PART 2 — FLORENCE MILLER

Her name was Florence Miller.

I met her several months later.