For sixteen years, it was just the three of us.
No help. No backup. No “we’ll figure this out together.”
Just me… and two tiny girls who cried through the night while I sat on the kitchen floor, holding one in each arm, wondering how someone could walk away from something so small, so helpless… so theirs.
Their mother didn’t hesitate.
“I pushed them out — that’s all they get from me,” she said, already halfway out the door. “I owe nothing else.”
And just like that, she was gone.
So I learned everything. How to braid hair—badly at first. How to pack lunches, help with homework, sit through fevers, heartbreaks, and school plays. I burned dinners, forgot permission slips, showed up late sometimes—but I never left.
Not once.
We built something, the three of us. Messy, imperfect… but ours.
Or at least, I thought we did.
Until the morning they were gone.