shop.
Her newborn son slept beside her in a carrier.
She looked completely different from the woman I’d seen in labor.
Younger.
Exhausted.
Less like a threat and more like someone who had lost her mother, found her father, been abandoned by her baby’s father, and somehow ended up caught inside a marriage she never knew she was being hidden from.
“I almost didn’t contact him,” she said.
“Why did you?”
“My mom died without telling me the truth. I didn’t want to repeat that pattern.”
The irony was painful
