When my mother died, I was ten. And somehow, even while he was breaking inside, my dad managed to hold our little world together. He burned French toast every Sunday, scribbled love notes into my lunchbox, and cried quietly in the garage when he thought I couldn’t hear.
But Cheryl arrived when I was fourteen. With her too-sweet voice and perfume that hung in the air like warning smoke, she wrapped my dad around her manicured finger. He thought she was warmth incarnate. I thought she was a chameleon. Around him, she glowed. Around me, her smiles thinned like paper left in the rain.
Still, I tried for his sake. Shewasn’t cruel—at least not in ways you could explain. Her cruelty came in sighs, in missing invites, in the way she rearranged the house and my place in it.
When he died five years later, it was sudden. A heart attack. No goodbye, no warning. Just a knock at the door and a collapsing world.
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