I heard the knock before it actually landed.
Three soft taps, spaced out like whoever was on the other side was trying to sound polite instead of desperate. My building in downtown Austin has one of those video doorbells that chime through your phone, but I didn’t need the screen. I knew that rhythm.
For a second I just stood there in the hallway, hand resting on the deadbolt, listening to my own heartbeat.
Behind me, the apartment was quiet—Lenora was at her book club, my laptop still open on the kitchen island, emails waiting. I could’ve pretended I wasn’t home. I’d done that for years as a kid.
Stay still, stay small, maybe they’ll go away.
I’m not nine anymore.
I undid the lock and pulled the door open.
My mother’s face appeared first, framed by the hallway light. Darlene looked older in the way people do when life has carved lines into them but hasn’t softened a thing. Her hair was pulled back too tight, lips painted the same shade of rose she used to wear to church.
Behind her, half a step back like always, stood my father, Arless, hands in the pockets of a jacket that didn’t fit quite right.
“Taran,” she breathed, like my name tasted unfamiliar. “Honey. You look… successful.”
Her eyes flicked over my shoulder, taking in the high ceilings, the framed art, the city view that cost more in rent than they’d ever paid on a mortgage.
She wasn’t seeing me. She was inventorying.
My father cleared his throat. “We didn’t come here to fight,” he said.
“We came because family helps family. After everything we did to raise you, we thought—”
There it was.
The invoice hidden inside the greeting.
I felt my hand tighten on the edge of the door. It had been twenty‑one years since they’d last left me on a doorstep.
Twenty‑one years since the word curse came out of my mother’s mouth like a diagnosis. They hadn’t called for birthdays, hadn’t shown up for graduation, hadn’t sent a single card when the articles started using words like founder and Forbes.
But now they were here. In my hallway.
With their palms out.
“We just need a little help with your brother’s tuition,” my mother added when I didn’t respond fast enough. “You’re doing so well. You owe it to the family to give back.”
There was that word again.
Family.
It sat between us like something fragile they were pretending not to have dropped years ago.
I thought about the cream envelopes, the lawyer letters, the mediation room where they’d tried to turn abandonment into a parenting strategy.
I thought about the VHS tape of a little girl standing with a backpack on a porch while a car pulled away.
I thought about every door they’d ever closed on me.
And then, very quietly, I answered.
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
My mother’s mascaraed lashes fluttered. “What do you mean, no?
We’re your parents. You wouldn’t be who you are without—”
“You’re not my family anymore.”
The words came out level, not shouted, not dramatic. Just true.
I watched them land, watched my father’s jaw clench, watched my mother’s hand reach for the doorframe like she needed something to hold on to.
For one heartbeat I was nine again, standing on a different step, listening to a different car door slam. Then the moment passed.
I tightened my grip on the door.
“You left me at a door once,” I said. “This time I get to be the one who closes it.”
And I did.
The deadbolt slid into place with a soft, final click.
—
The first time they abandoned me, there wasn’t a suitcase, or a social worker, or a conversation.
There were crayons.
I was cross‑legged on the living room carpet in our small house in Cedar Rapids, a stack of printer paper beside me, the cheap kind that went gray if you pressed too hard.
The TV was off. My job, unspoken but understood, was to stay quiet whenever their voices went sharp.
That morning, the shouting started before I finished coloring the sky.
My parents were in the kitchen, separated from me by a half‑wall that might as well have been made of tissue. Every sound came through.
The clink of a mug. The scrape of a chair. My mother’s voice first, high and brittle.
“She’s a curse, Arless.
You know it. Ever since she showed up, everything has gone to hell.”
I paused, blue crayon hovering mid‑cloud.
“She didn’t ‘show up,’” my father shot back. “She was born.
And you know we were fine before. I lost my job two months after she came. Then the miscarriage.
You can’t tell me that’s coincidence.”
Their words knifed through the thin wall. Curse. Bad luck.
Mistake. Words I wasn’t supposed to hear, or maybe they didn’t care anymore whether I did.
I stared down at the drawing in front of me. I’d sketched a small house with a crooked roof and three stick figures holding hands—Mom, Dad, me.
There was a dog too, even though we didn’t have one. I’d drawn a sun in the corner, bright and cartoonish.
Suddenly the paper looked stupid.
The shouting went on until my mother’s voice dropped low and dangerous. “We were never supposed to have her.
You said that yourself.”
Something in my chest tightened, like a fist closing around air.
I didn’t know what “never supposed to” meant, not really. I knew what “curse” meant. I’d heard kids whisper it on playgrounds about haunted houses and bad report cards.
I’d never heard it applied to a person.
I’d never heard it applied to me.
After a while the yelling stopped. Silence pooled in the house, heavy and weird. I’d learned over the years that this silence was worse than the shouting.
Shouting meant someone cared enough to waste breath. Silence meant they’d made a decision.
It found me anyway.
“Taran,” my mother called.
I set the crayon down carefully. My heart pounded so hard I could feel it in my throat.
I wiped my hands on my jeans even though there was no color on them and walked into the hallway.
She didn’t look angry. That almost scared me more. She had her coat on, keys in hand, her dark hair pulled into a low ponytail.
Her lipstick was perfect.
“Go pack a bag,” she said.
“For what?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
I waited for more details—sleepover, weekend trip, something. Nothing came. So I did what I’d been trained to do.
I obeyed.
In my room I grabbed my favorite jeans, a hoodie two sizes too big, the one that smelled faintly like fabric softener and the cafeteria.
I hesitated over my shelf of stuffed animals before picking up a small gray rabbit with one floppy ear.
“Come on, Penny,” I whispered, tucking her deep into the corner of my backpack like a secret.
The entire drive, the radio was off. My mother’s hands were locked at ten and two on the steering wheel. I watched the world blur by through the passenger window—bare trees, tired houses, the gas station with the flickering E in its sign.
I tried to guess where we were going.
Sleepover with a cousin.
A surprise trip.
Anywhere but where we ended up.
When she turned onto my grandparents’ street, my stomach dropped.
We’d been there a hundred times, Sunday dinners and holiday arguments and the faint smell of cigarette smoke seeping from the walls. But the car felt different this time.
She didn’t pull into the driveway. She eased to a stop in front of the house, engine still running.
“Get out,” she said.
I stared at her.
“Did I do something wrong?”
Her jaw tightened. For the first time all morning, she looked at me. Really looked.
“You were never supposed to be here,” she murmured.
Then she looked away.
For one wild second I thought this was a test.
That any moment she’d laugh, say, “Just kidding, hop back in,” and we’d go somewhere normal, where kids didn’t get labeled curses by the people who named them.
She didn’t laugh.
I wrapped my fingers around the backpack straps and stepped out of the car. The October air cut straight through my hoodie. The door shut behind me with a hollow thud.
I watched her taillights disappear at the end of the block.
That’s the sound that stayed with me for years—not the yelling, not the word curse, but the low hum of the engine as she drove away.
I rang the doorbell with numb fingers.
My grandfather cracked it open.
He squinted at me like he’d been expecting someone else.
“Taran? What on earth are you doing here?”
My throat locked. I tried to answer and nothing came out.
I glanced back at the street, but my mother’s car was gone.
He followed my gaze, his shoulders sagging.
“We… we can’t go against your parents, honey,”
