2: 2
Back at the office, I walked straight into my supervisor's room.
I picked up the pen and filled out the transfer consent form without hesitation.
He nodded slowly.
"Good that you've come around. This is a real chance to grow."
"You leave in five days. Pack ahead of time and wrap up your handover."
I nodded.
Five days. Enough time to pack away every attachment and every memory this city held.
Just then my phone buzzed.
A message from my parents.
"The neighbor said you went by the house today? We've been so busy lately, we just forgot to tell you we'd moved."
I stared at the screen, my fingertips cold.
Half a month.
A full fifteen days.
Busy moving into the new house, settling into their comfortable new life.
And in all that time they couldn't spare the few seconds it would take to tell me.
I typed back only two words.
"Got it."
Then I went home to the little apartment I rented.
It was the only corner of this huge city that truly belonged to me.
The place was plain and clean.
Every appliance, every household thing, I had bought with my own money.
For three years I scrimped and saved.
I handed most of my salary over to other people and shortchanged no one but myself.
My eyes drifted to the closet.
A heavy black coat hung in the most prominent spot.
An old style, the edges slightly worn, seven years old.
And a treasure I'd kept for seven full years.
The winter of my freshman year.
My mother bought me a new piece of clothing for the first time on her own.
This black coat.
Seven years, and I could never bring myself to throw it out.
On countless nights when I wore myself down inside, I'd look at this coat and talk myself back to calm.
Telling myself over and over that my mother didn't not love me.
That I had a family too, that I was a child my parents had thought about too.
This coat was the one thing I could hold onto in my gray childhood,
the only proof I had that I'd once been loved.
While I was lost in it, my phone lit up again.
A message from my sister, Sharon Shepherd.
"Sis, Mom and Dad told me about you going all the way to the old house for nothing. You're not upset, are you?"
"I booked a table at a hotel tonight, my treat, call it me making it up to you. You have to come, okay?"
I looked at the screen, drifting for a moment.
Sharon and I had never been close, not even as kids.
She was the little princess everyone doted on.
I was the invisible one no one bothered with.
She was used to soaking up all of our parents' favoritism.
And just as instinctively, she overlooked that I existed.
But this time…
In five days I'd be leaving for the far western branch.
Twenty-two hundred miles away, over mountains and long roads.
The odds were I'd never set foot in Harrington again.
Call it one last goodbye.
I tapped out a single word in reply.
That evening I put on the black coat and headed out to meet her.
But I ran into rush hour, and the car crawled.
I messaged Sharon ahead.
"Traffic's bad, I might be about ten minutes late."
She replied quickly.
"No rush, we'll wait for you."
Such a simple line, and it stirred a faint warmth in me.
Maybe blood really did count for something in the end.
Maybe they weren't so cold after all.
"Okay."
