The night my father told me to leave still sits in my memory like a bruise that never fully faded. I was seventeen, terrified, and three months pregnant with a future I had no idea how to handle. When I finally gathered the courage to tell him, I expected shouting or disappointment—something loud, something fiery.
Instead, he stood up from his chair, walked to the front door, opened it, and said, in a voice stripped of anything human, “You should go.”
