a distance.”
Everyone laughed.
That was when something inside me went quiet.
They did not know why I worked at the diner.
They did not know I had dropped out of college because Dad’s cancer bills swallowed everything before he died. They did not know I had been paying the property taxes on Mom’s house for three years because she said she was “temporarily short.” They did not know I was taking night classes online with scholarship money no one had helped me apply for.
They only knew the version
