Chapter 1 - The Room My Family Took From Me
The rain came down in sheets that Monday afternoon, the kind of cold, relentless downpour that seeps into your bones and makes you question every life choice that led you to that moment. I was exhausted, my shoulders aching from cataloguing a shipment of nineteenth-century correspondence all day at the museum. All I wanted was to collapse into my bed, maybe heat up some leftover pasta, and lose myself in a documentary about Victorian architecture. Instead, I came home to find my vintage drafting table—the one I’d spent six months hunting down at estate sales and another three months painstakingly restoring with my own hands—lying on its side in the front yard like discarded trash.
I could see it from my car, water pooling in the hand-carved grooves I’d spent hours cleaning with a toothbrush. My heart dropped into my stomach. I hadn’t even put the car in park when I saw her. Paisley. My sister. She was standing by my bedroom window—my bedroom window—with her phone held up at that insufferable angle, filming herself with the practiced smile she’d perfected for her two hundred and fifty followers.
“Hey, dreamers, it’s Paisley here, and, oh, you guys, I have the most amazing announcement!” Her voice carried across the wet lawn, artificially bright and energetic. “We’re finally creating the perfect space for baby Ember’s arrival, and let me tell you, the natural light in this room is just chef’s kiss.”
My hands were shaking as I threw the car into park. Not from the cold, though my thin cardigan was already soaked through from the thirty-second sprint from the museum parking lot to my car. No. I was shaking with a rage so pure, so absolute, that it felt like electricity coursing through my veins. I grabbed my bag and ran toward the house, my shoes squelching in the muddy lawn. As I passed the drafting table, I could see the damage up close. The joints I’d so carefully re-glued were separating. The finish was ruined. Months of work, destroyed in an afternoon.
“What is going on?” I burst through the front door, water dripping from my hair onto the hardwood floors I’d helped refinish two summers ago. My mother, Pamela, was standing in the living room with her arms crossed, wearing that expression I’d come to know so well—the one that said she’d already decided I was being unreasonable before I’d even opened my mouth.
“Audrey, you’re making a scene,” she said, her voice clipped. “Come inside properly and close the door. You’re letting the cold in.”
“My drafting table is outside in the rain.” My voice cracked, and I hated myself for it. “My table, Mom. The one I’ve been restoring for months. It’s ruined.”
“Well, we had to make room,” she said, as if that explained everything. “Paisley needs space for the nursery setup, and that table was taking up so much room. We couldn’t move around it.”
I stared at her, water still dripping from my clothes and forming a puddle on the floor. “Make room? In my bedroom? That’s my room, Mom. My private space. The space I pay for.”
“Don’t be dramatic.” She waved her hand dismissively. “It’s just a room. And technically, your father and I own this house.”
The words hung in the air between us. Technically. As if the fifteen hundred dollars I’d transferred into their account every single month for the past three years was just a suggestion. As if the ten thousand dollars I’d spent renovating the attic into a usable studio was pocket change. Let me back up. You need to understand what I sacrificed to be standing in that house at all. Three years earlier, my father, Arthur, had made what he called “aggressive investments” in a commercial property development that went belly-up. The details were murky—Dad had never been good with numbers, despite his inflated confidence—but the result was crystal clear. The house was heavily mortgaged and underwater by about forty thousand dollars. The bank sent foreclosure notices. My mother cried for weeks.
I was living in a decent apartment near the museum then, sharing it with a roommate who respected boundaries and actually paid her half of the utilities on time. I had savings. I had peace. I had a life that made sense. But I’m an archivist. I preserve things. I restore order from chaos. It’s not just what I do. It’s who I am. And the thought of my childhood home, flawed as it was, being seized by a bank—the thought of my parents becoming one of those cautionary tales people whispered about at dinner parties—I couldn’t let it happen. So I moved back.
I negotiated a deal: fifteen hundred a month, which they called rent, but which we all knew went directly toward the mortgage payment. I took the attic, that dusty, cramped space filled with Christmas decorations and boxes of my mother’s college textbooks that she hadn’t opened in thirty years. I spent ten thousand dollars of my carefully hoarded savings transforming it. I installed a skylight to bring in natural light. I laid warm oak flooring over the rough plywood. I soundproofed the walls because archival work requires absolute concentration. One misplaced date, one incorrectly attributed document, and months of research can crumble. I made it beautiful. I made it mine.
May you like
It was my sanctuary, the only place in that house where I could breathe. And for three years, it worked. I paid my fifteen hundred every month. Always on time. Always without complaint. I watched my savings account dwindle. I turned down dinner invitations because I couldn’t afford both the mortgage contribution and a social life. I made it work because that’s what you do for family. That’s what I thought family meant.
Then Paisley showed up.
