I Returned For Thanksgiving To Find My Parents Gone—And My Father Waiting

to this—helpless, abandoned, sitting in his own filth.

And then relief.

Profound, overwhelming relief that someone had finally come.

“Jana,” he rasped, my name coming out like grinding sandpaper over gravel. “Angel?”

“I’ve got you,” I said, my voice trembling with a rage I hadn’t fully processed yet, with a fury that was just beginning to build in my chest continue reading …