The memory of my childhood is haunted by late-night phone calls full of muffled whispers barely audible behind thin walls. I could understand the coded phrases. I wasn’t supposed to know, but I did. As we boarded the plane on a Thursday night, distracted by the thought of home, I knew why we were leaving. This same place we always went back to was foolishly a good place to her, but it wasn’t to me. This time, and every time afterwards, the warm air didn’t greet me in a welcoming hug as I stepped through the sliding doors. Instead, it suffocated me. Even it saw that I knew the secret. We hadn’t gone there to soak up powerful rays of the blazing southern sun. We hadn’t spent late afternoons chasing spotted lizards on hot pavement. I wasn’t ever blinded by that innocence back then. I hadn’t needed to be sheltered from a looming fear that everyone else thought was too hard to handle. I knew that fear. And each and every time, when we left to go back, I dealt with it. And when the last of the late-night calls marked the end of the worst days, we had already known what the voice at the other end had to say. There was no shock and no fear. Only sadness. But it was the right sadness.