They never imagined the body could remember what the mind was ordered to forget. They renamed me, rewrote me, and trusted the silence of a manila folder more than the tremor in my hands. But the first time Daniel said my old name—my real name—it didn’t sound like a revelation. It sounded like a verdict being read aloud.
I watched his face change as he recognized the shape of me, the way you recognize a house after the fire: different, but undeniably the same foundation. My parents—both sets of them—had built entire lives on the hope that what burned wouldn’t follow. Yet here I am, proof that it did. I don’t get to choose which childhood was “real.” I only get to decide which truth I live with awake, and which one I agree to haunt in my own shadow.
