Chapter 5

And neither am I.

I read it four times. The words don't have the decency to change.

Twenty-one years. Twenty-one years of Marla's bottles and Marla's ring and Marla's God, you're stupid — and none of it was even mine to live through. I wasn't hers to hate. I was a thing somebody left on a doorstep and drove away from.

I keep waiting for it to crack me open. It doesn't. That's the part that scares me. Twenty-one years of being somebody's burden, and finding out I wasn't even that just lands in me like one more double shift…