I kept my voice even.
“The documentation stays in my files, not as a threat, as a record, so that everyone involved, including me, remembers that this happened and what it cost.”
My mother was quiet for a moment.
“That’s very cold, Ariana.”
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
I told Liliana the next morning over hotel waffles she’d made herself with the silver iron and an alarming amount of syrup that we were going to find our own place.
Just ours.
She looked up at me with syrup on her chin and the particular expression she wears when she’s deciding whether news is good or bad.
“Like an apartment?”
“Like an apartment.”
“Can I put stickers on the inside of my closet door?”
I looked at her, this small, complete syrup-covered person who [clears throat] had slept on a folding cot and woken up pressing her hands against a bag of snow like it was a miracle, which it was, which she was.
And I said, “You can put stickers on every surface in the entire place. I don’t care. It’s ours.”
She thought about this seriously.
“Even the ceiling?”
“We’ll discuss the ceiling.”
She went back to her waffle.
I sat across from her in the gray morning light of a hotel breakfast room with Dana’s number in my phone and three copies of a document in my bag and a ziplockc bag of half-melted Colorado snow slowly becoming water in the cup holder of my car in the parking lot outside.
And I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time, possibly ever, in this specific combination, clean and certain and entirely irrevocably my own.
My mother had told me to be grateful for the roof.
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Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction created for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.