Moonlit ferns.
For the first time in weeks, I opened the sketchbook without flinching.
I sharpened my pencil and finished the crescent moon.
Outside, Charles Street was wet again.
Cabs moved through the gray afternoon.
Someone wrestled with an umbrella on the sidewalk below.
Nothing about the city had changed.
But when my phone buzzed on the desk, I didn’t feel that old automatic fear under my ribs.
My mother’s number could no longer reach me.
My father’s messages were routed through Daniel.
Rebecca had stopped trying.
The silence that remained wasn’t the silence my family had demanded from me for years.
It wasn’t obedience.
It wasn’t shame.
It belonged to me.
I looked at the small paper star turning slowly in the warm air above my desk, lowered my pencil to the page, and kept drawing.
