My mother stepped around me as though I were a misplaced chair.
“We’ll see you afterward,” she said lightly, not actually looking at me.
My father followed her without speaking.
That was the moment I felt it again—that strange, hollow sensation of being erased while still physically standing in the room.
My name is Elena Carver, I’m thirty-four years old, and for most of my life I have occupied a strange role within my own family: present, dependable, but somehow never essential.