My parents kicked me out one day after my C-section—with my newborn in my arms. Then my husband pulled up, looked at my face, and made one phone call that changed everything.

Suzanne moved fast. Much faster than Wendy’s sore, sleep-deprived body could anticipate. One moment she was near the dresser. The next her hand was in Wendy’s hair.

She twisted hard.

Pain exploded across Wendy’s scalp and down through her neck. The sudden jerk of her upper body pulled viciously at her abdomen, a bolt so sharp through the incision that her vision flashed white. She gasped and clutched herself instinctively with her free arm, terrified she had torn something internally. Paige startled and began to scream.

“You are moving just fine,” Suzanne hissed, face inches away. Wendy could smell coffee on her breath. “Now pack your bag, stop your pathetic whining, and get out. I will not have you ruining Cheryl’s first day home with Jaden.”

Wendy’s body shook. The room blurred. She could not fully process that her mother’s hand was still wound in her hair, that Paige was crying, that the pain in her stomach had become an animal thing clawing outward from the incision.

Then Suzanne let go like she had merely adjusted a curtain.

Wendy looked toward the hall as if some neutral witness might appear and correct reality. Instead Philip’s voice floated up from downstairs over the television. “Please get her out of here, Suzanne. The sight of her clutching her stomach is making me uncomfortable. It’s depressing.”

That word landed harder than the hair pulling.

Depressing.

Not serious. Not cruel. Not alarming.

Just aesthetically inconvenient.

Wendy stared at the doorway and understood, with a clarity so cold it almost felt like calm, that no sentence would save her. No appeal to kindness. No reminder of surgery. No invocation of family. Nothing. The decision had been made before she woke up. Cheryl mattered. Wendy obstructed.

So she did the only thing left that preserved any scrap of control.

She obeyed.

Packing took twenty minutes because twenty minutes was how long it took a woman fresh from abdominal surgery to move through a room while holding back sobs and trying not to collapse. Wendy laid Paige in the bassinet long enough to grab diapers, wipes, extra swaddles, her medication, nursing pads, loose sweatpants, a stained robe, chargers, the little knitted blanket Mitchell’s aunt had mailed from Asheville. Every thirty seconds she had to stop and breathe through the burn. Her mother stood in the doorway watching with crossed arms like a hotel manager timing a late checkout.