the last book I ever read (The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas, excerpt six)

from The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas:

I’d planned to go home once my grandmother was out of the hospital, but then I realized that I couldn’t leave the city: our residency permits had expired and our new ones still had not arrived.

Don’t worry about it, my mother said, each time I apologized for not being there. We have everything sorted out.

That made me even sadder, as if my arrival had never been expected and they’d never really counted on me to help.