The scent of stale espresso and the sharp, chemical tang of packing tape hit me before I even reached the bottom of the staircase.
I tightened the belt of my sleepwear, padding barefoot across the chilled floors. The house was usually perfectly silent at 7:00 a.m. on a Saturday, but a low murmur of voices drifted from the kitchen. It wasn’t the casual chatter of a weekend morning; it was the hushed, tactical whispering of scavengers picking over a carcass.
I rounded the corner and felt a physical jolt, a cold dread coiling tightly in my gut.
The sprawling, white Carrera marble kitchen was unrecognizable. Jason stood by the island, already dressed in a crisp, powder-blue button-down shirt, his jaw locked tight. But the true horror was the assembly line operating in my foyer.
Hovering near the entryway were his parents. Linda Carter wore a taut, practiced smile, aggressively wrapping a silver-plated photograph in newspaper. It was a picture of my late grandmother. Her husband, Frank, was taping up a battered U-Haul box, his foot resting casually against the baseboard I had painstakingly restored. They were packing my life into boxes, treating my history like discarded refuse.
