Mom brought me into the family room. She sat on the old brown leather couch. It was fake leather. You could see the yellow foam peaking through cracks, as if desperately trying to escape suffocation. I knelt on the floor beneath her. My knees bent into the rough forest green carpet and I waited for her to say something. I waited for her to start speaking. I glanced around the dim room, it was cold. Cold like unsaturated. The oak French doors let through only clouds. No sun. She sat above me on the old brown fake leather couch, in her black v-neck t-shirt and maroon cotton shorts. Her dark brown hair pulled back messily in her brown claw clip with flyaways framing her oval face. She looked at me with hazel eyes and spoke softly. Sweetie, I have to tell you something, something sad. I knew. I knelt there on the carpet, my knees turning red from the roughness, and I knew what she was going to say. As an eight year old, I was perceptive. And we have thin walls. So there we sat on the old brown fake leather couch and forest green carpet, clouds blocking the sun from coming in through the oak French doors, complete silence surrounding us and shaping our deep breaths as I wrote down divorce? on that slip of notebook paper and placed it in her warm kind hand. And the tears flowed, and I hopped up onto the old brown fake leather couch covered in cracks with layers underneath begging to escape the fake shiny leather, and into her arms I went, and she held me, and we cried.