The night my father told me to leave still sits in my memory like a bruise that never fully faded. I was seventeen, terrified, and three months pregnant with a future I had no idea how to handle. When I finally gathered the courage to tell him, I expected shouting or disappointment—something loud, something fiery. Instead, he stood up from his chair, walked to the front door, opened it, and said, in a voice stripped of anything human, “You should go.”
Five words. No anger. No apology. No hesitation.
I waited for him to take it back. I waited for my mother to intervene. All she did was appear in the hallway, eyes full of panic, before my father sent her silence with a single look. She turned away and vanished up the stairs.
I picked up the small duffel I’d packed in fear—some clothes, a necklace from my grandmother, two photos—then stepped out into the cold November air. The porch light clicked off behind me, and that was it. I wasn’t just leaving home; I was being erased from it.
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