The Vanishing Half

Her mother would never forget Stella. She would stare into the mirror for the rest of her life, reminded of her loss. But Jude wouldn’t add to her grief. She would talk to her mother on the phone, days later, and not say a word about Stella. Maybe she was like her aunt in that way. Maybe, like Stella, she became a new person in each place she’d lived, and she was already unrecognizable to her mother, a girl who hoarded secrets. A liar.

“You tell yourself no before anyone even says it to you.”

The hardest part about becoming someone else was deciding to. The rest was only logistics.