made to move forward without him in the picture at all. “It was to protect you,” she said quietly, eyes fixed on the photograph rather than on me directly.
I listened carefully to every word of it. But I genuinely didn’t let the matter simply rest there, unchallenged. “Protection can absolutely be real,” I told her, choosing each word with real care. “But so can avoidance, Mom. And those two things aren’t always actually the same thing, no matter how similar they might feel from the inside.”
She didn’t argue
