My bed. My quilt. The linen curtains my momma had picked out with me at a dusty little shop on Wadmalaw because she said a bedroom should feel like a soft place to land.
Micah’s boots were lined up by the door like soldiers.
His clothes were somewhere on my floor.
And his presence—him, all edges and quiet intensity—had suddenly blended into my life with a kind of inevitability that terrified me.
I lay there, staring at the slice of sunlight on my wall, and waited for the emotional earthquake I’d always assumed would come after a first time.
I’d always thought I would feel … ruined.
Not because I believed in purity. I never had. My parents were practical people who taught us to be kind and honest and responsible, not ashamed. They talked about sex the way they talked about money—something you didn’t throw around carelessly, something you respected because consequences existed.
But it wasn’t morality that had kept me from having sex.
It was something quieter.
Something harder to name.
A kind of internal math I’d been doing my whole life without realizing it.
If I give someone access to me—my body, my vulnerability, the places I don’t show anyone—what happens when they decide I’m not worth keeping?
That fear didn’t come from religion.
It came from history.
From an origin story that didn’t begin with a warm, familiar face telling me I was wanted. It began with a blank space. A question mark. A file I didn’t get to read until I was old enough to understand what it meant to be left behind.
People loved to say adoption was beautiful. A miracle. A gift.
And it was.
But it was also this: learning, very young, that love can arrive after loss.
That you can be chosen later.
That “forever” might require paperwork.
My parents never hid it. They didn’t make it a secret, didn’t whisper it like shame. They told me my story the way they told me everything—straightforward, loving, matter-of-fact.
We wanted you.
We found you.
We chose you.
We choose you.
Every day.
And I believed them. I did.
But a small part of me—some animal part that lived under language—still held onto the earliest lesson.
People can leave.
So, I learned to be … good.
