What happened that evening was never supposed to matter, and that is the part that still makes my stomach turn when I think about it, because it began with something small and harmless and ordinary, the kind of moment you forget as soon as it’s over, the kind of decision you make when you’re tired but trying anyway. I didn’t set out to uncover anything, I wasn’t searching for proof of anything, I wasn’t even thinking about the possibility that my life could split cleanly into a before and an after, yet it did, quietly, without warning, under streetlights that buzzed like they always did, on a sidewalk I’d walked a hundred times.
It had been one of those days that felt heavier than it had any right to feel. School dragged in slow motion, every class ending with the same exhaustion and the same dull sense of having survived rather than accomplished anything.
My mother was working late again, which had become normal in the way storms become normal when they roll in often enough, and our apartment felt too still, too quiet, like it was listening to itself. My father hadn’t been home for dinner in weeks, always “running behind,” always “stuck at the office,” always arriving after the rest of the building had gone dark, but I kept telling myself adults had complicated lives, and sometimes complicated meant absent, and absent didn’t always mean dangerous. I believed that because believing anything else felt like betraying my own home.
My little sister, Lila, tugged at my sleeve while I stood by the door with the keys already in my hand, her small fingers insistent, her face tilted up toward mine with the kind of hope that feels too pure for a world that disappoints people routinely.
“Can we get ice cream?” she asked, not demanding, not whining, just asking the way children ask when they think a yes might still be possible. “Mom said maybe.”
I hesitated because I was tired and I could already see the rest of the night unfolding in my head, dishes, homework, the quiet loneliness of waiting for someone who kept coming home later and later, but Lila’s eyes were wide and shining, her hair half a mess, her hands still sticky from the popsicle she’d dropped earlier, and she looked like she needed something sweet the way people need air. I told myself it would be quick, that it would be safe, that it would be a small kindness in a day that hadn’t offered many.
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