The thoughts start coming at night mostly.

  Not all at once. Just one, and then another, and then I’m lying in the dark at two in the morning building a case I’ve been building since I was nine years old.

  If I hadn’t been difficult.

  That’s always the first one. Papa’s word, in Papa’s voice, said on a Wednesday when he didn’t think about what he was handing me. I know a nine year old is not difficult in any way that makes a mother leave. I know that. And then the lights go off and it’s two in the morning and knowing things doesn’t help.

  If I hadn’t said it.

  And there it is. That’s the real one. That’s the one I always get to eventually no matter how many other thoughts I go through first.

  I was five years old and I was sitting on the living room floor with my doll and Mama was folding laundry right there, right in the same room, and I looked up and said it like it was nothing. Like I was reporting the weather.

  I wish she was my mom instead.

  I said that. I said that to my mother’s face.

  I didn’t know. I was five and I didn’t understand what I was holding or what I was saying or what it would cost. I know that. I understand that about myself at five years old.

  I still hate her. That little girl on the floor. I hate her so much that sometimes I want to go back in time just to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until she stops talking. I want to put my hand over her mouth before the sentence comes out. I want to sit her down and say do you have any idea. Do you have any idea what you’re about to do.

  She didn’t know, I think.

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  I don’t care, I think back.

  And it wasn’t even just that once. That’s the part I can’t get past. I said it once while she was folding laundry and she didn’t react and I didn’t even know anything had happened. But before that, at my birthday, over the candles with everyone in the room, I made the wish. I closed my eyes and I wished for Annie to be my mother instead and I meant it with everything I had because I was five and Annie was fun and I didn’t understand the difference between fun and love.

  I wished for someone else. Twice. And she heard both.

  She was standing right there when I made the wish, I think. She was the one who lit the candles. She was the closest person in the room and she heard me wish her away.

  The thought sits on my chest like something heavy.

  I think about her hands at the birthday table, wrapped around her tea. The smile that didn’t move. I didn’t notice any of it. I was five and I was looking at Annie’s gift and I didn’t notice that I had just broken something in my mother’s face.

  If I had just kept my mouth shut.

  If I had been easier. Quieter. The kind of child someone wanted to stay for.

  If I had been enough.

  That’s the one at the bottom. I wasn’t enough to stay for. Maybe if I had been different she would have looked at me and thought I can’t leave that. Not that.

  But she left.

  I think about Lilia. The soup and the jacket and sitting outside the door. All the ways my mother stayed for someone. And I know it’s not Lilia’s fault. I know that completely. Lilia is good and she is my closest friend and she did nothing wrong. She was just born into the life that I lost.

  What did she have that I didn’t.

  Me. I was the difference. I was the thing that was wrong.

  I don’t cry. I stopped being able to cry about this years ago. I just lie there and let the thoughts do what they do and wait for morning.

  In the daytime I am fine. I go to my shifts at the library. I meet Lilia for coffee between her freshman lectures. I am so good at the daytime that sometimes I almost convince myself that the two AM version of me doesn’t exist.

  I don’t tell Lilia any of it.

  She asks sometimes, that direct patient way, and I say I’m just tired. She accepts it because I look fine.

  She’d worry, I think. And she has done nothing wrong and she deserves to just be happy. Someone in this story should get to just be happy.

  So I keep the nights away from the days. I carry the if onlys the way I’ve been carrying things since I was nine years old making myself a sandwich in an empty kitchen.

  It’s fine.

  It’s fine.

  I’m so tired.