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Abandonment is rarely a sudden, explosive event; more often, it is a slow, agonizing erosion. For Ivy, her parents didn’t vanish in the night; they simply faded out of her life in the spaces between whispered arguments and heavy sighs about whose “turn” it was to deal with her. By the age of ten, the realization had settled into her bones like a chill: it wasn’t that Charlie and Tanya couldn’t keep her, it was simply that she didn’t fit the aesthetic of the new lives they were so eager to build.
Her father, Charlie, had moved on to Kristen, a woman who looked at Ivy as if she were mud tracked onto a pristine white carpet. They created a curated, filtered version of family—matching pajamas on Christmas cards, perfect toddlers with honey-colored curls, and sun-drenched barbecues. Ivy was the “leftover,” the inconvenient reminder of a previous chapter that Charlie wanted to erase. Her mother, Tanya, had married Donnie, a man whose low, rumbling grumble was more terrifying than a scream. When their daughter Rosie was born, Tanya’s world narrowed to feeding schedules and baby-tracking apps. Ivy’s attempts to share her life—like a sketchbook of the backyard—were met with one-armed pats and requests for silence because “Donnie just worked a double.”
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