Yasha turns to the side and plucks a marigold out of the planter. He twirls it around his finger, stripping the leaves from the stem one gentle tug out a time. “Do you have any family?”
“None that would care if I went missing.”
You’d think I’d get used to my family’s dismissal of me. That, at some point, the ache of their indifference would stop hurting. But the wound reopens again and again, as fresh as the day I first left.
“Are you an only child?” he asks.
He smiles knowingly. “I recognize my own kind.”
Talking about myself is one of my least favorite pastimes, so I jump at the opportunity to shift the focus to Yasha. “What about your parents?”
He moves from the marigold stem to the petals. He plucks them one by one, making a pile on the table in front of him as he talks. “Addicts
