Part 1 of 2
By the time you’ve wrestled a six-year-old into a puffy coat in a family shelter bathroom, your standards for what counts as “having it together” are… flexible.
If you’d walked in on us that morning, you might have thought it was funny. A comedy sketch. A tired mother kneeling on cold tile, a little girl sitting on a metal folding chair with her sneakers on the wrong feet, both of us squinting in the dim fluorescent light like vampires seeing the sun for the first time.
It did not feel funny.
“Mom,” Laya whispered, holding up two socks like they were pieces of evidence. “It’s okay. They don’t have to match.”
One sock was pink with a unicorn that had lost most of its sparkle in the shelter laundry. The other had once been white, now some anonymous grayish color that said it had seen things and would not be speaking to reporters.
I stared at them like they were a multiple-choice question I would fail. Somewhere in a parallel universe, another version of me was probably arguing with her kid about screen time and organic snacks. This version of me was trying to decide whether mismatched socks would make my daughter stand out in the wrong way in a first-grade classroom where she already had “the girl from the shelter” hanging over her like a neon sign.
“It’s a bold fashion statement,” I managed. My voice sounded thin, scraped out. “Very ‘I do what I want.’”
Laya’s mouth twitched, then bloomed into a smile that was all gap-toothed bravado. “I do what I want,” she repeated, and for a heartbeat the shelter bathroom vanished. It was just us again. My kid. My girl. Her mismatched socks. My stupid, aching love for her.
Then someone banged on the bathroom door and shouted that it was almost six, and the spell broke.
We stepped out into the corridor. The shelter always smelled like too many lives crammed into too little space: stale coffee and disinfectant, baby powder and sweat, something frying somewhere, someone crying in a room two doors down. The air had the permanent hum of televisions tuned to different channels through thin walls.
We walked down the stairs, past the peeling bulletin board with its flyers—parenting classes, AA meetings, a lost stuffed elephant someone had drawn with heartbreaking care. The heavy front door creaked when I pushed it open, like it was exhausted too.
Outside, the cold hit us in the face. It was the kind of winter morning that felt like the world had been scrubbed too hard. The sky was a bruised gray. The sidewalk was damp and glittered faintly with leftover frost. If I tilted my head back, I could see the faded sign above us: ST. BRIGID FAMILY SHELTER. The word that always snagged in my chest wasn’t shelter. It was family. As if we weren’t people anymore, but a category.
Laya adjusted her backpack, which was nearly as big as she was. I tugged her coat zipper up to her chin and tried not to look like my insides were unraveling.
“Okay,” I said, forcing cheer into my voice. Fake it till you at least don’t scare your child. “Bus in five minutes. We made it.”
She nodded solemnly. Laya has this quiet kind of courage that’s impossible to describe without sounding dramatic. It’s in the way she doesn’t argue when things are clearly fragile, the way she watches adults like she’s taking notes.
“Mom?” she asked, so softly I almost pretended I didn’t hear. “Do I still have to say my address if Mrs. Cole asks?”
My stomach clenched. The school forms still had my parents’ apartment listed. The word “address” had started to feel like a trick question.
“I don’t think she’ll ask today,” I said.
It was a coward’s answer. She didn’t push. She just glanced down at her shoes—scuffed, too small if I was honest—then up at my face again, like she was checking to see if I was still me and not some stranger who’d worn my skin and given up.
“Mom,” she said again after a beat. “Are we going to move again?”
My mouth opened. No sound came out.
I could have said, I don’t know. I could have said, I hope not. I could have lied and said no. But it was like my throat had glued itself shut around all the possible answers.
That was when the black sedan slid to the curb like it had taken a wrong turn out of some other, nicer neighborhood.
St. Brigid did not get visits from sleek black sedans. We got beat-up hatchbacks with trash bags in the backseat and Ubers whose drivers looked startled to be here. This car looked… intentional. It hummed as it idled, quiet and expensive.
Laya’s hand tightened around mine. “Is that a taxi?” she asked.
“No,” I said automatically. “I don’t—”
The back door opened.