When I was sixteen, I watched my father pull out of our gravel driveway for a routine business trip to the coast. He leaned out of the window and called out to me with a wide, bright smile, “When I get back, Elara, we are finally taking that long weekend to tour the architecture academy in San Diego.”
He never made it home because a highway collision took his life before the sun had even set that evening.
In the weeks following the funeral, I expected my mother and me to cling to each other in our shared, suffocating grief. Instead, she moved with a cold and terrifying efficiency, scrubbing every trace of his presence from our home. She packed his life into cardboard boxes while talking incessantly about the necessity of a clean slate and a fresh start.
“I need to move forward, Elara, and you cannot stay stuck in the past if you want to survive this world,” she told me one afternoon while taping up a box of his favorite old wool sweaters.
Less than two years later, I found myself standing in a pristine and soulless marble foyer in a wealthy suburb of Phoenix with a single suitcase in my grip. My mother had married a man named Harrison Vane, a high-ranking executive who looked at me as if I were a permanent stain on his expensive flooring.
Harrison’s son, a boy named Justin, was immediately handed the keys to a luxury SUV and granted the largest suite in the house with a balcony overlooking the pool. I was ushered into a cramped, converted attic space above the laundry room that lacked proper insulation and featured a window no larger than a dinner plate.
When I finally worked up the courage to ask my mother about my college fund, she didn’t even bother to look away from her reflection in the vanity mirror. She informed me that my father’s life insurance money had been folded into the family’s new assets and that Justin’s private university tuition was the current priority.
Harrison didn’t bother with my mother’s soft tone, leaning against the doorframe with a look of pure, unadulterated disdain. “This household does not reward charity cases or freeloaders, and you will be finding your own path the very second you turn eighteen,” he said firmly.