“I refuse to share a home with an ex-con.” I heard my sister-in-law, Sheila, declare from just behind the front door of the house I had spent two years longing to return to.
I froze on the front step with one hand gripping my suitcase.
My heart hammered inside my chest.
From within the house, my mother, Abigail, spoke quietly, yet every word reached my ears.
“It’s better for everyone this way, Sheila. If Summer comes home, she’ll ask for her portion of the house,” Abigail said with a weary sigh. “With a prison record, nobody will employ her, nobody will want to marry her, and she’ll end up staying here forever.”
Sheila answered with a cold, mocking chuckle.
“Then she can rent a place somewhere else because I’m expecting a baby,” Sheila replied. “I need calm, not an ex-con sitting around my living room.”
It felt as though my heart had shattered. Our house in Columbus was never luxurious, yet I had paid for much of it through years of exhausting work at a clothing warehouse downtown. Before I was sent to prison, my father often said I was the child who kept the family afloat. Every Sunday, my mother brewed coffee for me and proudly called me her strong daughter. Even my brother Austin sobbed in my embrace the night he begged me to accept the bl@me for him. Now, beyond that doorway, they spoke about me as though I were something contagious.
