My Family Forgot I Existed, So I Left Them Behind novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: One Day Each

They came at dawn, in my father's pickup, and they stopped at the iron gate with the engine running.

I watched from the porch with a mug in both hands.

My mother got out first.

She had not slept, and her good coat was buttoned wrong.

My father came around the hood and stood beside her, and neither of them touched the gate.

"Imogen," my mother said.

She had never said it so carefully.

I went down the steps in my socks and boots, and Torin came after me and stopped at the bottom.

I opened my own side of the gate a foot and stayed behind it.

"You remember," I said.

"One day," my father said. His eyes were red. "I was in the hospital corridor, and a nurse put you in my arms. You had a tiny fist, and you wouldn't let go of my thumb."

"It was snowing," my mother said. "I had been in labor twenty-two hours."

She wiped her nose with her glove.

"I was so angry at him that I wouldn't speak. Then they gave you to me, and I forgot every word."

She was crying again.

I stood with my hand on the cold iron and listened to two people tell me the day I was born, in the voice of people who loved the baby.

It was the best thing I had heard in three months.

"Can we come in?" my mother said.

"No."

She flinched.

I made myself keep going.

"You remember the day you got me," I said. "You don't remember the night Mom stood at the gala door and asked me if we had met."

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