Lena felt something crack inside her chest—not a rib, but something older, deeper. The cement she had spent two decades pouring around her heart was developing a hairline fracture.
She woke up in a hospital bed, which was ironic enough to make her want to laugh. Her body was broken in three places: a fractured pelvis, two cracked ribs, a concussion that would give her migraines for months. But that wasn’t the strangest part. The strangest part was the woman sitting in the plastic chair beside her bed. angelaboutme
She grew up hard and quiet, like a stone worn smooth by years of bad weather. Foster homes came and went—some indifferent, a few cruel, none permanent. She learned to cook for herself at nine, to forge a signature at eleven, to pack a bag in under two minutes by thirteen. By sixteen, she had aged out of the system with a GED, a part-time job at a diner, and a heart that had been carefully encased in cement. Lena felt something crack inside her chest—not a
Lena’s eyes burned. She hadn’t cried since she was seven years old, sitting on that hospital floor. She had forgotten what it felt like—the heat behind her eyes, the tightness in her throat, the terrifying vulnerability of letting the world see that she was breakable. Her body was broken in three places: a
She didn’t see Margo that day. But she felt her, somewhere on the edge of perception, like the memory of a warm hand or the last notes of a song.
Margo shrugged, crunching another cheese puff. “Just Margo. I’m your angel.”
Margo still showed up, though not every day. Sometimes she appeared on the fire escape outside Lena’s new apartment, eating cheese puffs and watching the stars. Sometimes she appeared in dreams—quiet dreams, the kind where you sit on a park bench and watch the leaves fall and feel, for once, that everything might be okay.