Chapter 1 - Torn in Half
I was still out of breath when I hit the front door, because I had run the last four blocks from the mailbox with the envelope clutched against my chest like it might try to escape.
The scholarship letter had come while I was at school, and Mom had texted me a picture of it sitting on the kitchen counter with three exclamation points, which was the most excited she had been about anything in years.
I grew up calling Vanessa my stepmother, but in our house that word never felt right, because she had been there since I was nine and she had made it clear early on that she was the one in charge of what happened under that roof.
I burst into the living room holding the letter over my head and I said it loud enough for the whole house to hear.
"Vanessa!
I got the scholarship!"
She was sitting on the couch with her phone in her hand, and she looked up slowly, the way she always did when she thought I was being dramatic.
I handed her the letter, and she read it line by line, and I watched her eyes move across the words with no expression at all.
I had been dreaming about that letter since I was fourteen, when my ninth-grade counselor told me that a full ride was possible if I kept my grades up and applied to the right programs, so I had done every single thing she told me to do.
Vanessa finished reading, and then, without a word, she tore the letter in half.
The sound of the paper ripping was the loudest thing I had ever heard in that room.
I just stared at her hands, and I could feel my whole body go cold.
"Ethan is supposed to be the successful one," she said.
My brother Ethan is two years older than me, and he had been the golden child in our house for as long as I could remember, but even he did not talk to Vanessa the way she talked about him.
My knees gave out, and I dropped onto the carpet in front of the coffee table, and the tears came before I could stop them, ugly and hot and embarrassing.
"Dad would be proud of me," I said, and my voice sounded small, like I was seven years old again.
Vanessa set the phone down and leaned forward, and her hand closed around my wrist hard enough that I felt her rings press into the bone.
"You tell him, and you'll regret it," she said, and she said it quiet, the way people say things they actually mean.
That was not the first time she had threatened me, but it was the first time she had done it while I was holding proof of something real in my hands, and for a second I thought about pulling away and running to my room.
Then I saw her face change.
Her eyes went past me, toward the doorway behind my shoulder, and all the color drained out of her cheeks like someone had flipped a switch.
I turned my head, and my father, David, was standing in the doorway.
He was still in his work jacket, with his keys in one hand and a single torn piece of my letter in the other, and he must have picked it up off the floor of the garage or the driveway without either of us noticing.
He looked at the half of the letter he was holding, and then he looked up at Vanessa.
"She'll regret what?" he asked.
Nobody in that room said a word for what felt like a full minute, and I could hear the refrigerator humming in the kitchen and a car passing on our street.
Vanessa let go of my wrist, and I pulled my arm against my chest and rubbed the red marks her fingers had left.
My father walked into the room and held up the torn piece so she could see it clearly, and his voice was calm in the way that scared me more than yelling ever did.
"I'm asking you a question," he said.
Vanessa opened her mouth and closed it again, and I realized in that moment that she had probably never once been caught, not in all the years she had been running things in our house.
I was eighteen years old, still on my knees on the living room carpet, holding the other half of a letter that said I had earned a full ride to college, and I understood two things at the same time.
The first was that my father had just heard something he was not supposed to hear.
The second was that this was not going to be about the letter at all, because a torn piece of paper can be taped back together, but whatever Vanessa had been hiding from him for all those years could not.
