I got down on the floor in front of her. I took her face in my hands.
“You listen to me,” I said. “You are not broken. Do you hear me? You are Mia. You are my whole entire world, and there is nothing broken about you.”
But she just looked at me with those big wet eyes, and I could tell she didn’t believe a single word. And the worst part — the part I’ll carry forever — is that some small, terrible corner of my own heart wasn’t sure I believed it either. Not because it was true. But because I was so tired, and so scared, and I didn’t know how to give her back something I couldn’t even hold onto myself.
She stopped wanting to go out. School was the worst. She’d come home and tell me nobody was mean to her, exactly, but that they looked at her different. That a girl named Presley had asked, right in front of everyone, if Mia was going to be “like that forever.”
