“We were told we didn’t have family,” Leo said, his voice dropping into a harsh, accusing register. “When the social workers took us in after the apartment was cleared out, when they put us through the system, when they asked if there was anyone—anyone at all—who could take us in, the file said we were completely alone. No grandparents, no aunts, no uncles. Just a blank page.”
“I know,” Margaret whispered, her head bowing slightly in shame.
“You know?” Leo stepped forward, his self-control fracturing completely as anger surged up to choke out his fear. “If you knew we were sitting in foster homes, if you knew we were getting bounced from one broken-down house to another for ten years, where the hell were you? Why didn’t you show up then? Why show up now, when everything is already over, when we’re already broken?”
Her voice cracked, thin and brittle like dry winter twigs. “Because your mother disappeared not because she abandoned you, but because someone threatened to take both of you if she stayed. She ran to keep you breathing. And she made me promise—on everything holy, on her very life—that I would stay invisible, that I would keep my distance, so that whoever was hunting us wouldn't find a bridge back to you through me.”
The teenager’s anger broke through his grief like jagged glass through ice, sharp and blinding. The injustice of it all, the phantom terrors of his childhood, the endless nights spent wondering why they weren't enough to keep a mother by their side—it all converged into a suffocating fury.