The next morning, I woke up with my hands still smelling like old water and rust.
The grease under my fingernails looked darker in daylight, like proof I couldn’t scrub away even if I wanted to.
For a second—just a second—I forgot why it was there. Then the memory hit: the shaking girl at the door, the screaming kid on the floor, the house that smelled like sour milk and panic… and the way that baby went limp on my shoulder like he’d finally found land after drowning.
I lay there in my clean, quiet bedroom and listened.
No wailing through the fence.
No pounding bass from someone’s TV.
Just birds and my own lungs and the refrigerator cycling on and off.
The silence should’ve felt like victory.
Instead, it felt like a room you walk into after the guests leave—too big, too empty, like the walls are waiting for something to break.
I got up, put on my oldest jeans, and did the thing I said I’d do.
I went to mow her lawn.
Her front yard looked like it had been neglected the same way her eyes had been neglected: not because she didn’t care, but because she had no extra hands.
Tall weeds clawed at the porch steps—right beneath something wedged in her screen door that shouldn’t have been there.
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