There are moments in life when the past you’ve worked so hard to bury resurfaces without warning, like a tide that rises quietly in the dark, swallowing the sand before you even realize the water has reached your feet. My moment arrived at three in the morning, in the middle of a heavy sleep that only exhaustion can produce, when my phone began vibrating across the nightstand. Normally, I would have ignored it; nothing good ever comes from calls at that hour except emergencies or heartbreak. But when the screen lit up, I froze. It wasn’t a relative. It wasn’t a coworker. It wasn’t one of the numbers every parent fears receiving. It was a name I hadn’t spoken aloud in over a year: Stacey. My former best friend. The woman who married my ex-husband.

And for a heartbeat, I thought it was a mistake or a pocket dial or something easily dismissed—until I heard her voice. It was raw, cracking, trembling in a way I had never heard before. “Lily,” she breathed, “I’m sorry to call you like this. I—I don’t feel safe. Please don’t hang up.” In that moment, every boundary I had built, every resentment I had polished until it gleamed, fell away. Something deeper than anger—something almost instinctive—made me sit straight up in bed. For years, I had tried to push my old life into the background, to create clean lines between who I was then and who I am now. But the past, as it turns out, cares nothing for the walls we build around ourselves. It enters when it chooses, carrying truths we were never ready to face and asking questions we’d rather leave unanswered.