A youth shelter found me a dorm-style bed: two bathrooms per floor, a shared kitchen for about twenty of us, quiet hours posted on the wall in faded marker. Warm, safe, clean. My aunt Denise—my mother’s older sister and my only relative—called once to say she had “no room” for me, that my uncle used the spare room as an office and she was “grieving too.” She was alert enough, though, to take half the insurance payout “to help with clothes and therapy.” She bought a wine fridge, a new car, a stack of romance and detective novels, and started showing up to book club in designer hats she called her “grieving wardrobe.” I didn’t fight her. I didn’t fight anything. Numb can look a lot like compliance.

By day I studied like oxygen lived between the lines of my textbooks—scholarships or bust. By night, when everyone else crowded around phones and sitcoms in the common room, I slipped into the kitchen. I learned the weight of flour by feel, the way butter breathes when it’s ready, how a wine bottle can stand in for a rolling pin if you scrub it enough. Blueberry, apple, cherry, peach, strawberry-rhubarb—whatever I could afford from my stipend and coupons. Sometimes I made ten pies. One night I made twenty.