I only opened the door a crack, just enough to see them. No chaos, no tangled limbs, no guilty startle. Just two kids on the floor, notebooks spread around them, my daughter explaining a math problem while he followed along, brow furrowed in concentration. The music was low, the cookies untouched, the scene almost painfully ordinary in the face of everything I’d imagined.
I closed the door as quietly as I’d opened it and walked away, cheeks hot with a shame they would never see. In that moment, I realized my fear hadn’t been about them—it had been about the possibility of losing the little girl I once knew. Trust, I understood then, isn’t the absence of worry. It’s choosing not to let that worry define how you love, or how tightly you try to hold on.
