People liked to say Maine was a good place to start over.
I used to laugh whenever I heard that.
“Sure,” I’d mutter, folding discount-store towels at midnight after my second shift. “If by start over, you mean freeze half to death and cry in your car behind the grocery store.”
That was before Daniel. By the time he came into our lives, I had already learned how to survive on almost nothing.
My mother had run off with my fiancé when my daughter was still in diapers.
Yes. My mother. My fiancé.
I can still see myself standing in our tiny kitchen, baby on my hip, reading that note for the fifth time as if the words might rearrange into something less disgusting.
They didn’t.
So I did what women do when no one comes to save them. I kept going. I worked two shifts most days.
Mornings at a diner, evenings stocking shelves.
I left Lila with Mrs.
Grant next door and paid her what I could. Sometimes cash. Sometimes I brought home leftover turkey sandwiches or soup cups from the diner.
He loved Lila from the beginning in that careful, respectful way that mattered more than grand gestures.
Lila called him Daniel from day one, and somehow that made me trust him even more.
With Daniel there, I breathed differently. For the first time in years, I signed up to finish the sewing courses I had abandoned after Lila was born.
I even bought myself a green wrap dress that hugged my hips just right and made my waist look like it remembered its manners.
When I stepped out wearing it one night, Daniel looked up from the sink and blinked.
“Well now.”
I placed a hand on my hip. “Careful.
This is a lot of woman in one dress.”
He smiled at me like I was the best thing he’d seen all week. “Seems to me the dress is doing just fine. It’s the rest of us who need to catch up.”
I should have known not to get too comfortable.
Because when life teaches you to expect the ground to give way, it only takes one strange moment to feel it shaking again.
It happened on an ordinary evening. Dinner was almost ready. I was walking down the hall to call Lila to the table when I heard Daniel’s voice coming from her room.
Then one sentence stopped me cold.
“Just don’t tell your mom, okay?”
“Okay… okay… okay…” I whispered under my breath.
The door to Lila’s room was slightly open. Just enough to see.
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