Break From Reality. Daily.
“Happy birthday, dear Petunia…”
I listened to Mom and Dad sing the high parts a little too high and the low parts a little too low.
“Happy birthday to you!”
This was the eighth time they’d sung this song to me and the second time they’d sung it without Skylar. Skylar had been my best friend ever since I’d started living with her.
Four days before Dad’s funeral, the mortuary’s number flashed on my phone as I rummaged through my closet, pretending it mattered to find a work-appropriate outfit that didn’t need ironing. A bass voice rumbled: “Ms. Silva? Howard Greenwood calling from Greenwood Memorial Gardens. Are you available this morning? It’s urgent that we speak in person.”
Urgent? In person? Traffic would gridlock on the Bay Bridge to the mortuary in Oakland. Hopefully, my 9 a.m. townhouse tour could be rescheduled—I needed that commission. Purchasing the “Golden Memorial Services” package had maxed my credit limit.
“All right,” I sighed into the phone, “I’ll be there.”
An hour later, I sat in the softly lit office, praying this wasn’t about my credit card.
Steel meets steel momentarily and silence consumes the forest. The final robber falls, gasping for breath, hands bound. Birds scatter, then settle again as my heartbeat steadied.
Another day saved. Another hollow victory.
As far back as I can remember, everyone has called me Alex, the local hero of Eras. It’s all I’ve ever known, though, sometimes, I wonder if this is all there truly is to life.
Everyone always said Grandma was a serial killer.
So naturally, I’m standing at her door with the rain stabbing me in the back like tiny knives. The brandy from the reception burns through my blood, keeping me warm in this raging storm. I take out the key to my late Grandma Lettie’s house and stumble in.
Smells assault me. Not the fresh-baked cookie scent of old-lady houses—but of Pine-Sol, bleach, and something new yet familiar. Acrid. Metallic.
Elias Vance, in his fifty-seventh year, was defined by the dry, precise comfort of the archive. Air was messy, full of humidity, pollen, and unpredictable scents. Archives were dry, labeled, and governed by the immutable laws of evidence. That preference made his current location—Blackwood Manor—not just a chore, but a profound insult to his meticulous nature.
The manor was a colossal, decaying Victorian house, huddled against the relentless coast of Maine. It was less a home and more a coastal fortress, its gables sharp and its windows empty, perpetually scarred by the salt spray and winter gales. The dense, old forest pressed in from three sides, its massive, silent pines seeming to judge the rot. Elias, dressed in a practical charcoal suit and white cotton gloves, had returned here after his estranged father’s death to do what he did best: inventory and liquidate. His father, Arthur Vance, hadn’t been a man of history, but a man of accumulation—a hoarder who used baroque furniture and obsolete knowledge as a heavy, physical insulation against reality.
“A shame,” Elias murmured, the word echoing in the cavernous, dust-choked entry hall. The house was not history; it was a memorial to a petty, solitary life, and Elias was determined to dismantle it piece by clinical piece.
Cengiz’s father had no idea his son was dead.
Naqisha hadn’t meant to kill the heir to the throne. But when Cengiz mocked her son Utku as less capable of coherent thought than a donkey, something inside her snapped. Before she realized it, she’d grabbed Cengiz’s dagger and thrust it into his heart.
An hour later, she fixed a smile on her face and joined Emperor Vural and two relatives for dinner. Hoping the emperor was oblivious that his son lay dead.
The silence was tense, a layer of thin ice stretched over a dark, restless feeling. A hawk’s screech pierced the air, its cacophonous sound cutting through the quiet like a knife. My muscles tensed before I even had a chance to process it, and a chill of memory rushed back.
I looked through a kitchen window at the frozen lake and the bare trees that reflected the hollow ache in my chest. The hawk’s cry hadn’t just broken the silence; it had torn open the past, merging a child’s scream with the hawk’s shriek into a single, unbearable sound.
“Make it stop!” I whispered, pressing my palms so hard against my ears that white static danced behind my eyes.
I should never have looked in that box.
Had I ignored my curiosity, I’d be enjoying one last peaceful morning in the backyard before the movers arrive.
Relatively peaceful if you ignore Mrs. Campbell’s dog baying in the yard next door. At least when he’s barking you know he’s where he’s supposed to be. Roscoe’s talent for escape is
legendary.
Maya Angelou once said, “To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.”
A mother’s love is nothing to scoff at; I’ve read articles about mothers lifting thousand-pound cars to save their children. Fighting off attackers, scaring off bears in the forest, anything to protect their children. There is absolutely nothing stronger in this world than a mother’s love for her child.
My daughter is sixteen now, and I will do anything, give anything, to keep this little girl safe from harm. Social media is terrible for a young girl’s mind in her formative years. It forces unnecessary comparisons, causes body dysmorphia, and can destroy a woman psychologically until she doesn’t know who she is anymore when she looks in the mirror. This is exactly why she doesn’t have a phone.
