I checked my phone.
No messages from my father. No messages from Victoria, my stepmother. No message from Brendan. No message from Meredith beyond the note she had left like a wound on the refrigerator.
There was only one text from an unknown number, sent exactly at midnight:
“Happy birthday, sweetheart. — Evie.”
I did not know any Evie. Not then.
I walked through the hallway like a ghost in my own house.
The walls were lined with family photos. I had counted them once during a summer afternoon when everyone else had gone to Cape Cod without telling me.
Forty-seven frames. Christmases. Vacations. Award ceremonies. Business dinners.
In forty-seven photographs, I appeared in three. In all three, I was half outside the frame.
At the end of the hallway, behind the bookcase, I reached into the little gap where I hid things as a child. My fingers found the photograph I had rescued from the trash years earlier.
It was my mother holding me as a baby. On the back, in faded handwriting: Catherine and Sierra, 2009. Forever loved.
My mother died when I was four. Cancer.
My father married Victoria eight months later. And from that point on, I became the leftover child in a new family nobody asked me to join.
I called my father at ten. He rejected the call. Not missed it. Rejected it.
I tried again. Same thing. So I texted him:
“Dad, it’s my birthday. Can we at least have dinner together tonight?”
The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Two hours later, he replied: