My husband’s daughter avoided me; her mom had died two years earlier. For the first eighteen months of our marriage, Maya was a ghost in our suburban Seattle home.
She drifted through the hallways like a quiet shadow, her eyes always fixed on the floor or her phone whenever I entered a room. I didn’t push her because I knew I wasn’t a replacement for the woman who should have been there. I was just the person who cooked the dinners she barely ate and folded the laundry she took back to her room in silence.
Maya sat down on the steps a few feet away, her knees pulled up to her chest. She looked small for a sixteen-year-old, swallowed by an oversized sweatshirt that I knew belonged to her mother. After a long silence, she asked if missing someone ever stops.
Her voice was so thin it barely carried over the sound of the rain. I took a breath, trying to find words that weren’t empty platitudes. I told her that the sharp, jagged edges of the hole eventually get smoother, but the hole stays.
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