My step-mother called to say, “You’re banned from the family beach house forever! I’ve changed all the locks!” She laughed. I calmly replied, “Thanks for letting me know.” She had no idea that mom had left me the house in a secret trust before she passed.
The first thing Alexandra Parker noticed that evening was the way the sunset struck the glass of her apartment window, turning the whole pane into a sheet of fire.
It was not a beautiful kind of fire. Not to her. Not that day. It had the harsh orange glare of something burning out, the last light of a long Boston afternoon catching on the towers beyond her building and throwing their jagged reflections back at her like broken blades. Her laptop was still open on the kitchen counter behind her, an unfinished project proposal blinking in silence. A mug of coffee she had reheated twice sat untouched beside a stack of marked-up client reports. The living room smelled faintly of printer paper, city dust, and the basil plant she kept forgetting to water on the windowsill.
She should have been answering emails. She should have been putting together the final numbers for a Monday morning meeting. She should have been doing any one of a dozen practical things that made up the life she had built far away from her father’s second wife and the endless emotional weather system that followed that woman everywhere.
