Chapter 10 - The Drawer
That page is still sitting in a drawer in my bedroom.
I've thought about burning it maybe nine separate times, and I haven't, and the reason why is on the back of it.
Because on the reverse side of that page, up in the top corner, faint and half-erased in pencil, there's a line of long division in my daughter's handwriting, left over from some ordinary math assignment.
She tore that page straight out of her own schoolbook to write me a warning she was never actually planning to give me herself.
I look at it sometimes. A child's arithmetic on one side. On the other, a photograph of a stranger's front door, and one sentence underneath it: she's mine.
Three men vanished from my life, one after another, and I spent a year and a half convinced it was because I was simply too much.
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Not once — not one single time in eighteen months — did it occur to me that the person actually doing all of it wasn't even in the room.
And that the person working just as hard to stop him was sixteen years old, sitting quietly at my own table, eating pasta, watching a stranger's face for signs of fear, with a folded piece of paper resting on her knee, waiting patiently for me to leave the room for a dessert that has never once existed.
