It has been a year now.
Ethan left in the spring. He didn’t pack much. He told me he loved me, and he told me he was sorry, and then he was gone. I have not heard from him since.
I am raising Eleanor alone in the house we bought together. She is a quiet child. She sleeps through the night. She hardly ever cries. Everyone who meets her says how calm she is, how peaceful, how lucky I am.
They don’t know what I know.
The rocking chair in the corner still moves sometimes. The humming still comes through the baby monitor at night, and I have stopped turning it off, because I have learned that the humming is only there when I am not paying attention. When I listen, it stops.
I do not know what my daughter is. I do not know if she is Eleanor, or my grandmother, or something else entirely.
But I do know this: I found the boy again last month. He is not homeless anymore. He has a name, and a mother who is not alive, and a story that I will one day tell Eleanor when she is old enough to hear it.
He told me that the only way to end it is to say her name out loud. Not mine, not the baby’s.
Hers.
So every night, before I go to bed, I walk to the rocking chair in the corner of the room, and I look at the empty seat, and I say, quietly:
« You cannot have her. »
And the humming stops.
And I go to sleep.
And in the morning, my daughter smiles at me, and her eyes are dark and ancient, and I love her anyway.
Because she is mine. Whatever she is, whatever she became, whatever came with her — she is mine.
And I will not let her go.
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