…she was crying. She had looked straight at the camera, because she knew it was there. She’d known all along. And the last line she wrote, in my handwriting, was: “If you’re watching this, I’m sorry. Meet me in the garage at 6 a.m. Bring the blue bag from under your bed.”
I didn’t have a blue bag under my bed. I checked. There was one. Packed. Clothes, my charger, my birth certificate, my favorite hoodie. I hadn’t packed it.
At 5:58, I walked into the garage. My mother was sitting in the car with the engine off, hands on the steering wheel. Her eyes were red. “Get in,” she said quietly. “We’ll talk while I drive.” And as we pulled out of the driveway, past my father’s dark bedroom window, she finally told me.
Dad had been reading my journal since I was twelve. Every night at four, after his shift. If I wrote anything about him, he’d take it out on her the next day, quietly, where I couldn’t see. So she started getting up at three. Reading it first. Writing replies so that when he read it, it looked like I was fine. “I wrote ‘I know. Hang on’ because I wanted you to,” she said. “I’ve been hanging on for both of us.”
We drove four hours to my grandmother’s house. A lawyer was waiting there. So was a woman from a domestic violence program. My mother had been planning it for a year. “I just needed to know you’d come,” she said. “So I asked you in the only place he couldn’t hear.”
That was eight months ago. We live in a small apartment near Grandma’s now. Dad has a restraining order against him. My journal doesn’t have a lock anymore. I don’t need one. Sometimes, though, I still leave a page open on the kitchen table. And in the morning, there’s a small reply in the margin, in my mother’s real handwriting. Usually it just says: “Proud of you.”
