Marked, Not Kept
"She didn't abandon you. She left a trail going the wrong way and let them follow it. She's the only reason you got to be twenty-eight."
The room tilted. Nineteen years. Nineteen years of a specific, well-worn, load-bearing story — she didn't want me, she left, that's what people do, so build a life that needs nobody — and this man had just walked in and put a crack straight down the middle of it.
"You're lying," Maya said again, but it came out wrecked, and they both heard it.
"I'm really not." Dane pushed off the table. "And here's the beautiful thing. She hid you so well that they gave up. Twenty years, nothing. You want to know what finally lit you up like a flare after all that work she