There was no warning.

No sign. No indignation.

She just left.

At first, they thought it was suicide.

It made sense, after all. She was depressed. She wasn't getting help. And her daughter…poor thing, it wasn't doing her any good. Must have been hell. Must have been heartbreaking. And after all that…nobody could say she was selfish…for doing what she did.

That's what they said. That's what they whispered.

Behind their hands, to my back, under the cover of dark.

I heard anyway.

And I became the daughter.

You know her? THAT girl, the one that drove her mother to the grave.

No one can blame the woman for wanting an out.

No one can blame her.

And I was happy.

Because maybe, I thought, maybe that meant that she felt BAD. Maybe that meant she had a conscious, that she, hidden away, had empathy. And possibility, maybe, even love.

For me.

But then the body turned up.

It was not blue, pale, and waterlogged.

It was torn and cut and slashed and destroyed.

Ripped to pieces.

She was in the woods.

An animal attack.

And everything fell apart.

My mother did not commit suicide. She did not feel the guilt for beating me every night. She did not jump off that bridge into the abyss of water.

Animal attack.

A freaking animal attack.

So that changed everyone's story, didn't it? They couldn't say that I was the daughter with the heart problem that was so bad it moved my mother into depression. That the hospital bills made her anxious and worried. That all the near death experiences I had crippled her with grief.

That it became too much and she threw herself into the ocean.

Because they soon came to realize that the slashes on her body told a different story. One they didn't know shit about.

Her response to the daughter with the heart problem was anger; harsh words and kicks and punches and changing the locks just when it rained.

But see, they didn't know that part of it. And so the heartbreaking story of suicide morphed into one were there was a mountain lion and an orphaned girl. And that one…that one wasn't nearly as tragic.

So when I moved, moved to Beacon Hills to live with my aunt, the story…MY story…had been told so many different times in so many different ways that people just couldn't bring themselves to care anymore.

There was no warning.

No sign. No indignation.

She just left.

At first, they thought it was suicide.

At first, I thought she cared.