Afterward, outside the courthouse, reporters called out my old name.
“Erin! Do you forgive your mother?” Mother-in-lawgifts
I stopped at the bottom of the steps.
For a second, sunlight flashed against the cameras, and I remembered the desert glare from fifteen years earlier. Heat. Dust. Laughter. The road curving away.
Then I looked at the reporters and said, “I don’t live my life around her anymore.”
That was the most honest answer I had.
A month later, I returned to Arizona with Ruth. We drove to Mile 42 in a rented truck. The old sign had been replaced. The road looked smaller than it had in my nightmares.
I stood in the place where they had left me.
No music rose. No thunder sounded. Nothing supernatural waited in the sand. There was only wind, scrub brush, and the simple fact of distance.
Ruth stood next to me. “You okay?”
I thought about seventeen-year-old Erin. Furious. Terrified. Certain that being unwanted meant being worthless.
“I’m here,” I said.
Ruth nodded. “That counts.”
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