Chapter 7 Leaving Home

• (Isabella POV)
• I packed like a woman preparing for her own funeral. Not because I had much worth stealing, but because every item I touched felt like evidence of a life I was about to abandon.
• A cardigan that still held traces of my mother's lavender soap. A paperback copy of Jane Eyre with pages swollen from too many bath readings, spine cracked where I'd bent it back to mark my place. A rosary my grandmother had pressed into my palm before she died. Beads worn smooth by decades of desperate prayers I no longer believed would be answered.