The Daughter They Cropped Out

MotoNovel 1 Chapters English

My parents were chronic, incurable romantics. Not the sweet, gentle kind you see in Hallmark films, but the toxic, all-consuming kind that operates like a two-person cult. In their eyes, I was never the tender proof of their devotion; I was the uninvited stranger who had elbowed her way into their private sanctuary. When I was seven, they left me home alone while I was convulsing with a one-hundred-and-four-degree fever because it was the anniversary of their first kiss. I remember clinging to my father’s trousers, sobbing, begging him to stay. He just peeled my small, sweating fingers off his hem and scolded me: "Don’t ruin your mother’s evening over a common cold, Laurel. Don't be selfish." If our next-door neighbor hadn’t heard my delirium through the shared wall and rushed me to the emergency room, my brain would have been permanently damaged. The morning of my college entrance exams, my father promised he would drive me to the testing center. Instead, he took my mother on a spontaneous detour to the scenic ridge thirty miles out of town just to watch the sunrise break over the mist. By the time I managed to secure a ride and sprinted up the concrete steps, the heavy double doors were already bolted shut. I missed an entire section of the exam. It cost me a full gap year of remedial study to take it again. When I finally graduated and was offered a coveted research fellowship at an environmental laboratory out in Denver, my mother’s eyes welled with wounded tears. "If you leave," she asked, her voice trembling like a bruised flower, "who’s going to help your father plan my surprise getaways?" My father told me to turn the fellowship down. "There will always be other labs, Laurel," he said, utterly convinced of his own wisdom. "You only get one mother." And like a fool, I gave in. Again. Until the night of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I was the one who negotiated the banquet hall down to their budget. I steamed the silver lace on my mother’s couture

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