Chapter 7 - The Severed Cord
The house took four hours to clear.
By midnight, the cruisers had driven away, taking Daniel to the county detention center for processing. My parents had followed in their sedan, screaming obscenities through the rolled-down windows at me until their taillights vanished around the bend of Willowbrook Lane. Melissa had called an Uber, leaving her designer luggage and boutique boxes stacked haphazardly on the damp gravel.
Nora and I stood in the center of the great room.
The house was an absolute wreck. Empty champagne flutes were balanced on the custom walnut windowsills. Half-eaten plates of gourmet appetizers were smeared across my white quartz countertops. Someone had ground chocolate cake into the fibers of my new wool rug, and the sliding glass door leading to the deck was smeared with greasy handprints.
I sank onto the floor, pulling my knees to my chest, and finally let the tears fall.
They weren't tears of sadness. They were tears of pure, unadulterated exhaustion. The weight of five years of sixty-hour workweeks, the endless criticism, the feeling of never being enough, the realization that my own mother had walked into my apartment, hugged me, and then stolen my identity to save her golden boy—it all crashed down on me at once.
Nora sat down on the floor beside me, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. She didn't say any useless platitudes like *everything happens for a reason* or *they’re still your family*. She just sat with me in the ruins of my housewarming party while the wind outside rattled the pine branches against the high windows.
"You won, Claire," she whispered after a long silence. "You protected what was yours."
"It doesn't feel like winning," I murmured, wiping my wet cheeks with the sleeve of my blazer. "It feels like surviving an explosion."
"Surviving is the first step," Nora said gently. "Rebuilding is the rest."
My phone buzzed in my lap. It was a text from my father:
*“I hope you’re happy with yourself. Your brother is in a holding cell because of your spite. If he loses his family and his career over this, you are no daughter of mine. Do not ever contact us again.”*
I stared at the screen for ten seconds. Ten seconds during which the scared, eager-to-please little girl inside me finally starved to death.
I tapped the screen, selected the contact, and hit *Block*.
Then I blocked my mother.
Then I blocked Melissa.
May you like
I stood up, walked into the kitchen, picked up the remaining half-empty bottle of my ninety-dollar champagne, and poured it down the drain of the sink. Then I grabbed a trash bag, handed one to Nora, and said, "Let's clean my house."
***
