“I meant nothing by it,” I said. But that wasn’t true. I had never felt a part of anything that good and wanted more than anything to not be the thing I was. By day—with Jolene and her family, with Lester even—I let myself believe that my father’s disappearance was on him and not me. But when I climbed into my mother’s bed at night, when my fingertips touched that knife that I still stored in the bed rails, I couldn’t help but think of myself as a person who didn’t belong, a person who could be left behind.
