Part One: The Last Normal Morning**
I turned eighteen on a Tuesday in September, and I spent the morning the same way I had spent every morning for as long as I could remember: in the controlled chaos of a house with too many people and too few bathrooms.
Our kitchen at seven in the morning was a peculiar weather system. There was always something burning, something spilling, someone yelling about something they’d borrowed without asking. My mother used to say that raising eight children in a three-bedroom house was like being in the eye of a hurricane: if you stayed very still and held your course, you could handle it. If you lost focus for even a moment, the walls would start to shake.
That morning, Tommy had decided to make breakfast.
Historically, that was never a good sign.
