A Life That Could Have Been

Over at AGNI, Myfanwy Collins has an essay, titled “Tobacco Road,” about how, when she was a child, a couple next door offered to adopt her:

They lived next door and had decided that they would like me to be their daughter. Over drinks one night at the round table covered in a plastic cloth in my soon-to-be stepfather’s kitchen, they suggested to my mother that they might adopt me. I was on the nubby couch in the other room, wearing my cap-sleeved yellow nightgown, up later than I should have been, watching ‘The Love Boat’ and breathing in secondhand smoke and stale breath.

You can read the rest of it here.