also brought me back to myself.
Outside, the garden gate clicked and my niece called my name. She was eight and loud and incapable of entering any room quietly. She burst in carrying a broken terracotta saucer and looked horrified.
‘Aunt Lena, I dropped it.’
For a heartbeat she looked ready to cry.
Then I heard my own voice, easy and sure in a way it had not been for months.
‘It’s only clay,’ I told her. ‘We’ll make something new.’
She smiled with all her missing front teeth. I laughed, not because anything was funny, but because the sound belonged to me again.
That was the part no one warns you about after betrayal. The day you stop listening for the voices that harmed you. The day the room where your life cracked open becomes a room where things can grow.
