My family locked me in the basement to give birth. Days later, they returned to find a dark red liquid seeping from the door. As my mother screamed, a voice whispered behind her, “Looking for me?”

myself retreating to the only sanctuary I knew, dragging my suitcases across the threshold of my parents’ sprawling, colonial estate. I was nauseous, perpetually drained, and entirely adrift in the wreckage of my late twenties.

Dinner in that house was a nightly exercise in psychological endurance. We sat around a massive mahogany table that felt more continue reading …