Three days earlier, I had made the hardest decision of the last thirteen years: I hadn’t sent Chloe, my stepdaughter, a birthday gift. And now this had shown up at my door.
David — my husband, her father — stood behind the couch, unmoving, his face gone the color of old paper. “Alice,” he said quietly. “Maybe you should wait. Take a minute.”
“A minute for what?”
He didn’t answer.
To understand why I was sitting on my living room rug with my palm resting on that warm cardboard, you need the thirteen years of birthdays that came before it.
I’m fifty-eight. I married David twelve years ago, when I thought love had already forgotten my address. He called me his second chance, whispered it into my hair at our small backyard wedding, and I believed him completely. His daughter Chloe was seventeen then — her mother had died a few years before, and I never once tried to slide into that empty seat. I just wanted my own chair at the table.
I knew becoming her stepmother wouldn’t be easy, but I tried. I cooked her favorites — baked ziti, that awful blue-box mac and cheese she loved. I asked about her friends without prying, gave her space without disappearing. For a little while, it actually worked. She laughed at my terrible jokes, asked how I got my pie crust so flaky.
Then, almost overnight, she went quiet.
