My stepmother thought she had finally won when she called to ban me from the beach house. She said my father signed it over, said the locks were changed, said even the …
The first thing I noticed was the way the sunset caught the glass of my apartment window.
It had been one of those long, bone-tiring days where the city felt like a machine chewing me up and spitting me out on the other side. My laptop was still open on the kitchen counter, an unfinished email glaring at me accusingly. I was standing by the window with the phone pressed to my ear, watching the jagged outline of skyscrapers carve into a sky painted in streaks of orange and pink.
And in the middle of that quiet, the voice I least wanted to hear said, with almost gleeful venom,
