Poetry of the Redeemed
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Appendix A: Day Two
(Kara)
Fiona came to me, of course. They always come to me; it is the thing I am for, in this city, the thing I have made myself into over twenty years — the door you go to when the floor has gone out of your house and you don’t know where else there is. Fiona has come to me before, over smaller things, the way you take a graze to the one friend you trust to be calm about blood. But she had never come to me like this, and I knew it the moment I opened the door, because Fiona, who dresses to come to me the way she dresses to go anywhere, who would no more arrive undone than arrive undressed, was standing on my step in yesterday’s gown with her hair not done and her face scrubbed raw with crying, and she did not say a word. She just held out a piece of paper, and her hand was shaking.
It took two days, mind.
I took it. I brought her in first — you bring them in first, always, before anything, you get them off the step and into the warm and sat down with something hot in their hands, because a person cannot hear a single thing you say until their body has stopped being afraid — and I sat her at my own table, where so many ruined mornings have been sat through, and I put the kettle on before I read the note, because the note would keep and Fiona could not.
Then I read it.
Gone to have a life. Don’t look for me. I’m well. I’m sorry. — C.
Five lines, in Cassia’s hand, which is a beautiful hand, the best young hand in the city; she’d have written it carefully even at a dead run in the dark, because she is careful, that girl, careful to her bones, and the care of it was the worst part, the even letters of a child who had thought it through.
Gone to have a life.
And I sat down across from my oldest court friend with that in my hand, and I had a choice to make, and I had perhaps the length of the kettle to make it, because I knew exactly where Cassia was. She was three streets from where Thea is lodged, in a clean narrow room I had found her myself the night before last, with a week’s rent paid and a word put in with the women who’d mind she came to no harm, because she had turned up on my doorstep at ten at night with a packed bag and a white set face and said I’ve left, I won’t go back, will you help me or do I do it alone — and I do not turn that away. I have never once turned that away, from anyone, and I was not going to start with a frightened brave child who’d found the nerve her mother spent sixteen years teaching her not to need. So I’d helped her. Of course I’d helped her. And now her mother sat at my table with the note in her shaking hand and the whole of her broken open, and the girl was safe, and I was the one who’d made her safe, and Fiona did not know it yet.
I want to set down what I did, because I have turned it over since and I am still not certain it was right, only that it was mine.
I did not tell her at once. I have thought about whether that was a kindness or a cowardice and I think it was neither; I think it was timing, which is the whole of my trade. You do not hand a drowning woman a fact. You get her breathing first.
So first I let her cry, and say it, all of it, the flood of it — gone, in the night, no warning, the window I think, her bed not slept in, I thought she was sulking, I left her alone to let her sulk and she was packing, Kara, while I sat downstairs being patient she was packing her bag — and I let it come, and I did not say any of the things you must never say, did not say there there or she’ll come back or you mustn’t blame yourself, because the first is nothing and the second I could not promise and the third was a door I was not going to open, not knowing what was behind it. I just sat, and held her hand across the table, and let the worst of the first wave go through her and out.
And when it had, she looked up at me with her ruined face and asked me the question she’d come to ask, the one she believed I was the one in all the world best placed to answer.
“You know about this,” she said. “The young ones who — who run. You know how to find them. Kara, you find people, it’s what you — help me find her. Tell me how. Tell me where they go.”
And there it was, laid in my lap, the whole cruelty of it: my dear blind friend begging me, as the great expert in lost children, to help her find the child who had run, two nights ago, straight into my arms.
I did not lie to her. I will say that for myself, whatever else. I have built a life on not lying to frightened people, because they can always tell, in the end, and the day they catch you in it is the day they can never come to you again, and they need somewhere to be able to come. So I did not say I don’t know where she is. I am not able to say that sentence; it would have curdled in my mouth.
What I said was: “She’s safe, Fiona.”
And I watched it not go in. I watched her hear it as the thing you say, the comfort-noise, I’m sure she’s safe, she’s a sensible girl — and I had to say it again, differently, with the weight on it, to make her understand it was not a hope.
“No. Listen to me. Look at my face. She is safe. I know she is safe. I know it the way I know a thing I have seen with my own eyes.”
And I watched her understand, slowly, the way the cold comes up through a floor — watched her go still, and her wet eyes change, and the question form, and arrive, and her mouth open on it.
“ ... How do you know?”
“Because she came to me.”
I will not write the sound she made. It was not a word. There are three or four sounds a person can make in that chair at my table and I have heard them all and that one was its own — not grief, grief she already had; this was something with betrayal threaded all the way through it, and under the betrayal, fighting it, a flood of pure relief so violent it looked like more pain, because she had just been handed her daughter’s life back and the hand that handed it to her was the hand that had been hiding it.
“She came to you.” Barely a voice. “She left my house — she climbed out of my window — and she came to you. You’ve known. Since when. Since when, Kara —”
“Since the night before last.”
“Two nights.” And now the anger, which I’d been waiting for, which I’d have been worried not to see. “I have not slept in two nights. I have walked the city. I have — and you sat in this house knowing — you let me — “ She couldn’t finish it. She didn’t have to. I’d have been just as angry. I’d have been angrier.
“I know,” I said. “I know what I’ve done. And I’d do it again, and I’m going to tell you why, and you’re going to want to throw that cup at me before I’m done, and you can if it helps, it’s an old cup. But you’re going to hear it first.”
And I told her.
I told her that a child who runs comes to a door, and that the only thing that matters in the whole world, in the moment they come to it, is that the door opens — that there is one place a desperate young person can go that will take them in and not send them back and not sell them out, because a child who runs and finds every door shut, or worse, finds a door that opens and then hands them back, that child does not come to a door again. They go somewhere with no door at all. I have buried those. I have buried the ones who ran and found nowhere, and I was not going to let Cassia be one, not for friendship, not for anything, and if Fiona’s girl had to choose a night to climb out of a window I thanked God on my knees that the door she ran to was mine, because mine opens, and mine does not hand them back.
“You’d have had her back by force,” I said. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t. You’d have gone and got her and brought her home and locked the window this time, and you’d have done it out of love, the purest love there is, and it would have been the single surest way to lose her forever. Because she didn’t run from danger, Fiona. That’s the thing you have to take hold of, and it’s the hardest thing I’ll say to you. She didn’t run from a cruel house or a cold mother. She ran from a safe one. She has never in her life lacked for love — you have poured it on her, I’ve watched you do it, she is the most loved girl I know — and she climbed out of the window anyway, which means love was not the thing she was short of, and you cannot fix this by loving her harder, and I am so sorry, because that is the only tool any of us reaches for and it is the one tool that won’t turn this screw.”
She was crying again, but differently now — not the wild flood, something lower and worse, the crying you do when a thing is going in.
“Then what,” she said. “If I can’t — if love won’t — then what, what is there, what do I —”
“You let the door stay open,” I said. “That’s all. That’s the whole of it, and it’s the hardest thing I know how to ask of a person. You don’t chase her. You don’t shame her. You don’t send your husband, you don’t send the watch, you don’t write her ten letters a day about your heart — you write her one, and it says I’m here, the door is open, come for supper any Sunday you like and go home after, no questions, I love you — and then you wait, and you keep the door open, and you let her come back on her own feet in her own time as a person and not a prisoner, and it will take longer than you can bear and you do it anyway. That’s how you keep her. Not by holding on. By being the thing she can always come back to. I know it’s backwards. Everything true about keeping people is backwards. I learned it the hard way and I’m giving it to you for free, which is the only thing I’ve got that’s worth anything.”
She sat with it a long time. The tea went cold between us; it always does.
And then, because Fiona is practical under the silk the way all of us are when the floor’s gone, she came at the thing from the side that frightened her most, and it was not the side I’d have guessed.