Ten minutes later, I sat in the back of a taxi, holding on tightly with each turn of the road. The driver glanced at me through the mirror, probably wondering why someone recently discharged from the hospital was heading home alone. I turned my head toward the window. I didn’t want questions. I just wanted to reach my front door.
But when the taxi pulled up to my building, a strange stillness filled the air. As I climbed the stairs to my apartment, everything felt unfamiliar. I slipped my key into the lock.
I tried again. Slowly. Carefully.
Still nothing.
A cold wave ran through me. And that’s when I saw the note taped to the door—crumpled, rushed handwriting I knew as well as my own.
“Don’t come back. No place for a leech here.”
I read it once. Then again. A third time.
My eyes stung, but no tears came. No shouting. No knocking. Just a quiet numbness that wrapped itself around my chest.
Thirty years of caring, saving, sacrificing. Thirty years of putting my son’s needs before my own. And now, coming home from the hospital, I was being pushed out of the life I had built for him.
But he had overlooked something important.
