Because when you read letters from the past, you see the moments where things could have gone differently. I used to live there — folded inside those pages, rereading the same sentences hoping the ending would change. Where someone could have spoken. Where someone could have acted. Where silence became a choice — and I learned to call that love because nobody told me the difference. That knowledge could lead to despair. And for a while, it did. I won't dress that up. I sat in the dark of what I now understood and let it be heavy the way it deserved to be. But God quietly slid a new page across the table while I was still mourning the draft. Responsibility. Not for what was done to me — but for what I do with the boy who survived it. The past is finished. The ink is dry. Chad and I shared the same beginning but we were never the same story. But the future is still unwritten — and Zuri is watching me choose the pen.
