I was born in a valley that never forgets a voice. Every cry, every prayer, every lie—it all settles into the folds of the mountain. My mama used to say, a woman’s heart ain’t her own till she’s too tired to use it, and I think she was right. I learned early that love and pain came from the same hand, that men could bruise you without meaning to and still say your name like it was a promise.

When I got pregnant the first time, I thought I’d finally found what women like me were built for: a man to stay, a child to hold, a place in a story bigger than my own. But he left, and the house filled up with ghosts of what could’ve been. The silence grew teeth. Meth found its way into my bloodstream like mercy disguised as lightning. It made me weightless, careless, quick. For a while, I believed I was flying. But meth don’t lift you—it digs. It hollows.

When they took my baby, I didn’t fight. The woman from the county had kind eyes, and that made it worse. She called me sweetheart as she buckled my daughter into a seat that wasn’t mine. I watched them drive away until the dust turned the road into smoke. After that, I didn’t need much of anything. Just a place to sleep, a way to stay numb, and enough money to make it to the next day. The men came, and I let them. It was easier that way. Call it survival, call it sin—it all paid the same.

But once—just once—there was a man who looked at me different. Not hungry, not pitying, just seeing. We didn’t talk much. He touched me like he was afraid I’d disappear, and for a few hours I believed I could start again. I let him all the way in because I wanted to keep a piece of that gentleness, something living. When he was gone by morning, I didn’t cry. I just lay there watching the light move across the ceiling, thinking maybe that was how love was meant to come for women like me—brief as a breath, gone before it could rot.

Now the nights stretch long and slow. I walk the edge of town where the neon hums and the road smells of rain and oil. I still see his eyes sometimes when I close mine, that quiet steadiness like he saw the woman I was when the mountain took me. I carry that look like a small ember in my chest. It don’t light the dark, but it keeps me from freezing all the way through.