“She is your mother, not mine. If she still wants to keep buying designer clothes on Fifth Avenue, then you start paying for them.”

That night I ate dinner alone by the window, watching the city lights blink over the horizon, and for the first time in years, the silence did not feel like an absence.

It felt like peace.

I thought it was all over.

I made a mistake.

The next morning, shortly after dawn, someone began banging on my apartment door hard enough to make the walls shake.