throwing it away.
Every time she looked at it, she remembered Daniel taking both keys while she begged him to stay.
Instead, she found a different use for it.
She placed Noah’s first hospital bracelet inside.
Then the tiny knitted cap he had worn home.
Not a memorial to the night she was abandoned.
A reminder of the night she stopped abandoning herself.
Noah stirred against her shoulder.
Claire kissed the top of his head and turned off the kitchen light.
The house was quieter now.
Smaller, somehow.
Safer too.
And when she locked the front door that night, the sound of the key no longer felt like someone leaving.
It sounded like home.
