The Name That Wasn't Mine

There are moments in life when you walk into a place that should feel like home—but it doesn’t.

Chapter 4 of The Name That Wasn’t Mine takes me back to one of those moments. Standing on my grandparents’ porch, seeing my mother for the first time in what felt like forever, I was met not with warmth, but with distance. Her eyes didn’t light up, her arms didn’t open. If anything, it felt like she was looking right through us.

The house smelled faintly of bleach and old furniture, like it had been scrubbed clean of its history, but not its ghosts. In the kitchen, there were quiet movements—pots shifting, hushed voices—but no real conversation. My siblings and I found our corners, as kids like us often did, trying to make ourselves small and unnoticed.

And then there were the horses. Just beyond a rusted fence, they stood in the sunlight, calm and unbothered by the chaos that lived in the house behind us. They were everything we weren’t—safe, steady, cared for. I remember thinking how strange it was that creatures like that could exist just steps away from a family unraveling.

Strange Reunion isn’t just a chapter about seeing my mother again—it’s about the hollow space where connection should be, the quiet ways children learn to protect themselves, and the bittersweet beauty that sometimes exists right outside the fence.

If you’ve been following along as I share pieces of this memoir, you know it’s not an easy story to tell. But it’s real. And for me, that makes it worth telling.

—Daniel Reyes