The Daughter They Cropped Out

Summary

My parents were chronic, incurable romantics.

Not the sweet, gentle kind you see in Hallmark films, but the toxic, all-consuming kind that operates like a two-person cult. In their eyes, I was never the tender proof of their devotion; I was the uninvited stranger who had elbowed her way into their private sanctuary.

When I was seven, they left me home alone while I was convulsing with a one-hundred-and-four-degree fever because it was the anniversary of their first kiss. I remember clinging to my father’s trousers, sobbing, begging him to stay.