Chapter 2 - Everything I Owned, FallingThe next afternoon I was walking back from campus when something pink drifted past the second-floor window of our building and landed in the hedges below.
I stopped walking.
It was my sweater.
Then a pair of jeans sailed out after it. Then one sneaker. Then its match. A stack of textbooks hit the pavement hard enough that pages fanned out across the grass. My bedsheets floated down after everything else, slow and almost graceful, like a parachute that had given up on landing anywhere gentle.
"Diane!"
I ran for the building. My suitcase came last, tumbling end over end before it hit the courtyard and burst open, scattering my whole life across the lawn in front of God and every neighbor with a balcony.
I took the stairs two at a time and jammed my key into the lock.
It wouldn't turn.
I tried again, jiggling it the way you do when you're too panicked to accept what's already obvious.
Nothing. She'd changed the locks.
I pounded on the door with the flat of my hand. "Diane! Open this door right now!"
It took a full minute before she did. She stood there in that same bright blouse, coffee mug in hand, looking at me like I was the one being unreasonable.
"What is wrong with you?" I said. "What are you doing?"
"Helping you move." She said it so calmly I almost believed she thought it was true.
"You threw my things out a window!"
"You said you were leaving. Marcus needs the bedroom this weekend. I'm just speeding things along." And then, like she was closing a cabinet, she shut the door in my face. I heard the deadbolt slide home behind it.
I walked back down to the courtyard on legs that didn't feel entirely mine. Up on their balconies, neighbors had already gathered to watch, a few of them not even pretending not to stare. I dropped to my knees on the grass and started gathering what I could — a textbook with a footprint pressed into the cover, one sock, my mother's necklace tangled in a bedsheet.
Then I saw something near the curb, half in the gutter.
Dad's photograph.
Face down. I picked it up with both hands, and the glass had shattered clean across his smiling face, cracks running right through the middle of him. I sank down onto the grass and just held it, not caring anymore who was watching from their balcony.
That was when a car pulled into the courtyard, its back seat and trunk stuffed full of moving boxes.
A man got out. I recognized him immediately from the handful of photos I'd glimpsed on Diane's phone over the last few weeks, the ones she thought I hadn't seen.
Marcus.
He looked at me kneeling in the grass. Then at the wreckage of my belongings scattered across the courtyard like a yard sale gone wrong.
"What happened here?"
Before I could get a word out, Diane leaned out the third-floor window, practically glowing.
"Marcus! Surprise! I cleared out the whole room for you!"
He looked up at her slowly. Then his eyes dropped back down to the broken photo in my hands, and something in his face shifted.
"Are you okay?" he asked me, and he actually sounded like he meant it.
I didn't answer right away.
"Is all of this yours?" he asked, looking around at the lawn.
"It was."
That was when I noticed the box in his other arm — a large yellow gift box tied off with a thick red ribbon, the kind of thing you'd expect to hold jewelry, not a bribe for a stepdaughter's bedroom.
Marcus lowered his voice so only I could hear it. "I need you to know something. I didn't know anything about this."
"Didn't know what?"
He glanced up at the window, then back at me, and something tired and disgusted crossed his face. "Diane told me she'd been a widow for two years. She told me you were her adult stepdaughter who wouldn't move out, that she'd been trying to get you to leave for months."
I froze with the broken frame still pressed against my chest.
"I only just started putting pieces together," he said. "I came here today for a completely different reason than she thinks I did." He held my eyes. "Please. Stay right here."
From above, Diane's voice rang out again, giddy. "Marcus! Is that what I think it is? Is that surprise for me?"
He looked up at her. Then back at me.
"Yes!" he called. "Come down here, sweetheart!"
The front door of the building flew open a few seconds later, and Diane came half-running across the courtyard with the widest smile I had ever seen on her face, her eyes locked on that yellow box like it was the only thing in the world.
Marcus held it between them and didn't hand it over.
"Do you remember telling me you'd been a widow for two years?" he asked her.
Her smile flickered. Just for a second.
Then it snapped right back into place. "Sweetheart, grief does strange things to a person's sense of time." She waved a hand toward me without even looking my way. "Don't listen to Vivian. She's been telling stories since the funeral."
Marcus didn't move an inch.
"I called your friend Rita this morning," he said. "Told her I needed the correct spelling of your married name for paperwork. She assumed I already knew everything, so she didn't hold back a thing."
Diane's throat moved as she swallowed.
"I searched your name after that," Marcus went on, his voice low and even. "And I found Daniel's obituary."
Silence dropped over the whole courtyard.
"He died three weeks ago, Diane."
May you like
Her mouth opened. Nothing came out of it.
Marcus lifted the lid off the yellow box, and there was no ring inside, no romantic gesture waiting under that red ribbon. Instead, printouts. A watch. A tie he must have given her. Photos of the two of them together, printed out like evidence. And sitting right on top of all of it, Dad's obituary, the one Marcus must have pulled up on his phone that morning and printed just to make his point in a way she couldn't smile her way out of.
