When I Was Four, My Mother Left Me Alone in a Church—Twenty Years Later She Returned Crying, “We Need You”
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Chapter 5 / 34
Chapter 5 - LEO
For years, I dreamed about my brother.
Not my parents.
Leo.
He had been eight.
Old enough to remember me.
Too young, I later understood, to control where our parents drove.
But when I was six?
Eight might as well have been thirty.
Why didn’t he come back?
Why didn’t he tell someone?
Why did he get to stay?
Florence never answered questions she could not answer.
“He may not have had a choice.”
“Did he love me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did Mom?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did they leave me?”
“I don’t know.”
I used to hate those answers.
May you like
Now I understand what a gift they were.
Florence never built a comforting lie that reality could later destroy.
