Not every dollar came back immediately.
But enough did.
And more importantly, Brandon could no longer pretend I had imagined everything.
The divorce was finalized almost a year after the night my mother and I walked out.
The day I signed the last papers, I expected to cry.
Instead, I felt strangely peaceful.
Claire and I walked out of the courthouse together.
She looked at me and asked, “How do you feel?”
I thought about it.
“Like I finally stopped carrying something that was never mine to carry.”
She smiled.
“That sounds expensive.”
I laughed.
It was the first real laugh I had heard from myself in monThS.
A few weeks later, I took my mother to lunch.
Her cheek had healed long ago, but I still noticed how carefully she looked at me whenever Brandon’s name came up.
She carried guilt that did not belong to her.
One afternoon, she finally said, “If I hadn’t moved in with you, maybe none of this would have happened.”
