The foolish part was believing that kindness could arrive without a reason.
When I was nine years old, a fire tore through our kitchen in the middle of the night while my mother was asleep upstairs. That was the sentence people used when they talked about me without meaning to. The fire. The scars. Poor girl. Such a shame.
We survived.
That was the official ending.
But surviving is not the same as leaving the fire.
Sometimes you carry it with you. Under your skin. Behind your eyes. In the way you flinch when someone lights a match across a restaurant. In the way your mother never lets candles burn after sunset. In the way smoke in winter air can turn you nine years old again before you even understand why your hands are shaking.
The burns covered the left side of my face, the side of my neck, and part of my arm. My left cheek was the worst. The skin there had healed tight and shiny in places, uneven in others. A raised line curved from below my eye toward my jaw, pale at the edges, pink when I cried, red when I was embarrassed.
And I was embarrassed often.
