talked around, never straight through.
We moved twice in those years, both times into something slightly smaller, both times Mom telling me it was an upgrade even when we both knew it wasn’t quite that. I learned early how to want less, how to ask for less, how to make a birthday feel full without anything expensive attached to it.
She met Marcus when I was sixteen.
She met him at a hardware store, of all places, both of them standing in the same aisle staring at the same confusing wall of paint samples. He asked her opinion on a shade of blue for his kitchen. She gave him one, honestly, and he actually listened, which she told me later was the thing that made her notice him in the first place.
He already had two kids. Jonah, eleven, and Lily, nine, every other weekend.
So we became five people
