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I know I never met her. I understand that gives me no authority to tell you what Juanita would think, but I believe she has seen the man you became. I believe she has been proud of you through more nights than either of us will ever know.

She saw every house you survived, every adult who failed you, and every time you protected yourself because nobody else came. She saw you build a life from everything meant to bury you. She saw you choose loyalty after abandonment, tenderness after violence, and love after the world taught you that loving someone gave them another place to hurt you.

You were robbed of your mother, Ryan, but she was stolen from her niño too.

When you find each other again, Juanita will confirm every word I am writing. She will tell you she saw every horror you endured and every time you stood back up. She will tell you that survival never made you difficult to love, and needing someone never made you weak.

She will tell you how proud she is of her son.

The first tear strikes her name.

I wipe it away before it can soak into the paper, then laugh at the uselessness of protecting ink while something inside me splits open.

My mother exists in scattered memories that never remain long enough. Her voice humming in the kitchen. Her fingers separating curls from my forehead. The Spanish prayers she whispered when she believed I was asleep. The shape of her body standing between me and a world she couldn’t survive long enough to protect me from.

Nobody has ever told me she saw what came after her.

Nobody has ever dared to give me that.

I bend forward and press my fist against my mouth while grief moves through the apartment. It is old enough to know every hidden place inside me and cruel enough to enter all of them at once.

The knock on my door comes several minutes later.

I don’t answer.

Briggs knocks again before using the key I gave him after the first night Lyric appeared outside our building.

He enters, closes the door quietly, and finds me at the desk.

“What happened?”

I shake my head because speaking isn’t possible yet.

His gaze moves to the pages in front of me. He doesn’t try to read them.

“Charm?”

I nod.

“Bad?”

Another tear falls before I can stop it. “No.”

Briggs remains near the door. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No.”

He crosses the room and lowers himself onto the floor beside my chair. His back rests against the wall, and his knees bend in front of him while he looks toward the windows.

He doesn’t ask what she wrote.

I place one hand against the back of his neck for a second, then release him and continue reading.

There is another truth I should have admitted long before now.

Lance is a racist.

Even writing those words makes me sick, although my disgust doesn’t excuse how long I refused to name what I already knew.