He just closed the door and turned off the porch light and left me standing there in the dark. I walked three miles to my aunt Rachel’s house. She was my mother’s sister, the black sheep of the family because she’d moved away and married a man my grandparents didn’t approve of and generally refused to go along with any of the family’s nonsense.

I’d only met her a handful of times at holidays, but she’d always been kind to me, always slipped me extra dessert and told me I was perfect exactly the way I was. When she opened the door and saw me standing there barefoot and shaking and clutching a garbage bag, she didn’t ask any questions.

She just pulled me inside and wrapped me in a blanket and let me cry until I couldn’t breathe. It’s the hand thing, isn’t it? She said finally, not a question. And when I nodded, she closed her eyes and said, I should have gotten you out of there years ago. She and her husband Cal took me in that night. They enrolled me in a new school.

They paid for therapy and college and everything else my parents should have given me. They became my real family, the ones who taught me what it meant to be loved without conditions. I never spoke to my parents again, not once in 19 years. But I kept loose tabs. I set up a few Google alerts. I checked Vanessa’s social media maybe once or twice a year just to remind myself that I’d made the right choice by never looking back.