My father got married three months after my mother passed away and told me to “give” my room to my stepsister and move out. So I said yes, packed my bags, and moved in with my uncle. Now my father is going crazy and doing everything he can to convince me to come back because he just received this in the mail.

My father remarried just eighty-nine days after my mother died.

I know the exact number because I counted it: first when the wedding invitation arrived with gold lettering and a picture of him with a woman I barely knew, and again the night he told me I should “grow up” and give up my room to her daughter.

Her name was Lorna. His daughter, Madison, was fifteen: loud, spoiled, and already calling my house in Cedar Rapids “ours” before they’d even opened the wedding presents. I was seventeen, still sleeping in the pale blue room my mother had painted years before, still waking up expecting to hear her in the kitchen. My grief hadn’t settled; it felt raw, like something alive beneath my skin.