For seven years, Shannon had lived with silence, regret, and a photograph of the daughter she had lost. Then one quiet morning, a little girl appeared at her door with Hannah’s eyes, Hannah’s smile, and a desperate plea that pulled the past back into her life.
The Tuesday morning light came through my kitchen window the same way it had for seven years. I folded a pile of laundry that nobody else in the world would ever wear.
My uniform shirts.
My work pants. A thin cardigan with a coffee stain near the cuff.
I set them in the basket and picked up my phone. No missed calls.
No new messages.
I checked the blocked list anyway.
It hadn’t.
On the bookshelf, behind a small glass frame, five-year-old Hannah grinned at me with two missing teeth. I ran a dust cloth across the glass like I had done every Sunday for as long as I could remember.
“Good morning, baby,” I whispered.
She didn’t answer. She hadn’t answered in seven years.
I poured myself the last of the coffee and tried not to count the days.
I had cleaned offices the night before, knees aching, back stiff.
That was the rhythm. That was the life I had built after her father walked out of a diner with a waitress and never came back.
I had been twenty-six. Hannah had been five.
We were going to be okay, I had promised her. Just the two of us against the world.
And we had been, for years.
Then Nathan happened.
I remembered the first dinner he came to my apartment. He had stood in the doorway like he was measuring the ceiling for collapse.
“Cozy place, Shannon,” he said.
“Thank you,” I had answered, ignoring the way he scanned the secondhand couch.
“Hannah tells me you clean offices.
That must be very honest work.”
“It pays the bills.”
“Of course it does.”
He said it the way someone says how nice for you when they mean something else entirely.
Hannah started apologizing. For my apartment. For my uniform.
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