Chapter 1
I was only two years old when I was told that my mother had abandoned me.
Of course, I was too young to understand what that meant.
I didn’t know what abandonment was. I didn’t know what a mother was supposed to do. I only knew the people around me and the house I called home.
My father, Daniel, was the person I looked up to.
And then there was my grandmother, Mama Grace.
She was my safe place.
Whenever I was afraid, I ran to her. Whenever I cried, she comforted me. Her presence made the house feel warm.
But there was one thing my father kept telling me as I grew older.
“Your mother left you when you were two,” he would say.
I believed him.
Why wouldn’t I?
He was my father.
Sometimes he would add, “Your mother wasn’t a good woman. She left you behind.”
Those words slowly became a story I carried inside my heart.
I began to believe that maybe I wasn’t important enough for my mother to stay.
But what I didn’t understand was that there were things about my childhood that nobody was telling me.
Because while I was growing up believing that my mother had forgotten me, she would sometimes come to see me.
She brought gifts.
She asked about me.
She checked on me.
And every time she left, I was left with questions I was too young to ask.
If she had really abandoned me…
Why did she keep coming back?
I didn’t know it then, but the truth about my childhood was much more complicated than the story I had been told.
And then my father remarried.
That was when everything began to change.
