Torn from Sanctuary

It was as though time speeded up after that. I remember hazily saying my goodbyes to the kind nuns who had taken me in when I was broken and forlorn. I knelt before the Mother Superior and she gently laid her hands on my head in a traditional gesture of bestowing blessings and asked, after a short silence,

"Is this what you want, child?"

I had grown very fond of the old woman who ran the nunnery l