Chapter 1 - Eleven Days in RedI was eighteen the day my father, Daniel, collapsed at the kitchen table and never got back up. Heart attack, the paramedics said, though it would be weeks before that word stopped feeling like it belonged to somebody else's life.
My Stepmom Threw My Belongings From a Third-Story Window Just Weeks After We Buried Dad — She Never Saw the Reckoning Pulling Into the Courtyard
For as long as I could remember, it had been just the two of us. Dad had raised me alone since I was six, and he did it the way he did everything — quietly, stubbornly, without ever once making it look hard even when I knew it was. He married Diane when I was thirteen, and I never disliked her exactly. We were just two people who happened to share an address. Polite at dinner. Distant everywhere else.
I never imagined she'd turn on me. Not really. Not while I still had his hoodie balled up under my pillow because it was the only thing in the apartment that still smelled like him.
The first crack showed up eleven days after the funeral. I was standing in the kitchen in that same hoodie when Diane walked in wearing a blouse the color of a fire engine, humming something under her breath like it was any other Tuesday.
"You're already wearing red?" I asked before I could stop myself.
She poured her coffee without looking at me. "Am I supposed to wear black forever, Vivian?"
"It's been eleven days."
"And your father would want me to keep living." She said it flat, like a fact she'd rehearsed.
I didn't answer. Truth was, I had no idea anymore what Dad would have wanted. He wasn't around to ask, and that gap where his answer should have been was the loneliest thing I'd ever felt.
Small things kept adding up after that, the way small things do right before you realize they were never small at all. A second toothbrush showed up next to hers on the bathroom shelf — blue, definitely not mine, definitely not Dad's. When I asked, she said it was a spare and changed the subject before I could ask a spare for what.
Then came the phone calls. She'd disappear into the bathroom with the fan running, and her voice would drop into something soft. Warm. A tone I'd genuinely never heard her use with my father in five years of watching them together. One evening, passing the door, I caught the tail end of a sentence.
"...it's been almost two years now. I know, I know..."
I stood there in the hallway for a second, frowning at the door. Then I told myself I was imagining things, that grief does that to you. My best friend Priya had said as much the week after the funeral, curled up next to me on my bed. "You're gonna see ghosts everywhere for a while. Don't trust the first version of anything."
So I let it go. I let a lot of things go that month — including how easily Diane's eyes slid right past Dad's photo on the hallway shelf, like a piece of furniture she'd stopped noticing years ago.
That was around when I remembered something Dad had said to me the winter before, the two of us hunched over cereal bowls at the counter on a lazy Sunday.
"Whatever happens, kiddo," he'd said, not even looking up from his bowl, "I made sure this place will always be yours."
I'd laughed at him. "Stop being dramatic, Dad." I figured it was one of those things parents say to make their kids feel safe, and I filed it away and forgot it completely.
I wouldn't remember it again until it mattered more than almost anything else in my life.
Three weeks after the funeral, I came home from a class I barely remembered sitting through. The hallway smelled like some new floral candle Diane had started burning — vanilla and something cloying underneath it, like she was trying to cover up how the apartment used to smell.
I dropped my bag by the door. "Diane?"
No answer. I walked toward my room. The door was open, and Diane was standing inside it holding two black garbage bags and a roll of packing tape, like she'd been waiting for me.
She turned when she heard me. Smiled — not warmly, more like the smile you give a stranger holding an elevator door.
"Good, you're home," she said, and dropped the bags on my bed. "Start packing."
"Packing for what?"
"To move out."
I actually laughed, thinking it had to be a joke. Her face didn't move.
"You're eighteen now," she said. "And I need this room."
Something cold moved through my chest. "Move out where? Dad's been gone three weeks."
"That's exactly why this has to happen now." She crossed her arms. "Marcus is moving in this weekend. He needs somewhere to put his things."
The name landed like a stone. "Marcus?"
"My boyfriend."
I gripped the edge of the dresser Dad had refinished for me when I was fourteen, sanded it down himself over a whole weekend because I'd wanted something that matched my room instead of hand-me-down furniture. "Your boyfriend? Dad's been dead three weeks and you already have a boyfriend?"
Whatever polite mask she'd worn for five years came off all at once.
"Your father is gone," she snapped. "I'm forty-three years old. I'm still young, and I am not going to spend the rest of my life dressed in black just so you can feel comfortable."
I stood there staring at a woman I suddenly didn't recognize at all, and I couldn't believe she was the same person my father had trusted enough to marry.
"I'll leave," I finally said. "Just give me time to find somewhere to go."
"Good." She shoved a garbage bag into my hands. "Start with the closet."
Then she walked out, and I stood alone in my room holding an empty trash bag like it was the only solid thing left in the world.
That night I locked myself in the bathroom and called Priya. She picked up on the second ring.
"Can I sleep on your couch?"
A pause. Then, gently, "For how long?"
"I don't know. A week, maybe. I'll figure the rest out."
"What happened?"
"Diane wants me out."
"She what?"
"Her boyfriend's moving in."
"Vivian." Priya's voice went hard in a way I'd never heard from her. "She can't do that. Your dad died three weeks ago."
"Apparently she can."
I heard her moving around on her end, already in motion. "Come by tomorrow after class. Bring whatever fits in a suitcase. My mom can grab you if you need a ride."
"I don't want to be a burden."
"You're not a burden, you're my best friend. Just say okay."
I swallowed hard. "Okay."
After we hung up, I sat on the bathroom floor with my knees against my chest. Through the wall, I heard Diane's voice again, soft and almost girlish.
"...soon now, honey. It's been so long since anyone made me feel like this..."
Then she laughed, light and easy, like she didn't have a single worry in the world.
I frowned at the tile between my feet but I was too tired, too hollowed out, to chase the thought any further. I went back to my room and packed my mother's necklace, the one Dad had kept for me after she passed when I was small. Three sweaters. Two pairs of jeans. My school things.
Then I walked into the hallway and lifted Dad's photograph down from the shelf — the one from my sixteenth birthday, both of us laughing at something just out of frame — and carried it back to my room like it was something that could still get hurt.
That night I slept on top of the covers, still dressed, holding his picture against my chest.
May you like
I told myself I only had to survive until I finished packing.
I had no idea Diane wasn't going to give me even that much time.
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