Heartless

I had their love once. They saw me for the girl I am and the person I yearn to become one day—a woman who thrives in her freedom and dances away in her rightfully earned independence. They saw all the strong, unafraid parts of me, and coaxed each one of them out, daring me to dream bigger, climb higher. They never once saw the girl I had been groomed to see in the mirror. The abandoned daughter of a dead man. The unwanted child of a woman who despised her. The broken body formed wrong and built ...