The Vanilla Candle
The first thing I noticed when I opened my apartment door that Thursday was the smell. It hit me before I even got the key out of the lock, a thick, sweet wall of vanilla so strong it made my eyes water. My apartment had never smelled like vanilla in the two years I’d lived there. It smelled like coffee in the morning and like whatever I’d burned for dinner at night, and the rest of the time it didn’t smell like much of anything, which was exactly the way I liked it.
The second thing I noticed was that my couch was gone.
I stood in the doorway with my laptop bag still on my shoulder and stared at the space where it should have been. My couch was a charcoal gray sectional, the first real piece of furniture I’d ever bought for myself, and it had lived against the long wall under the window for two years. In its place sat a dining table I had never seen before in my life. It was dark walnut with carved legs and six matching chairs, the kind of table you see in a furniture showroom with a bowl of fake lemons in the middle of it.
My bookshelf was missing too. In the corner where it used to stand, there was a lamp with a pink fabric shade, the kind with little tassels hanging off the bottom, and three cardboard boxes stacked beside it. The top box had JOLENE, KITCHEN written across it in purple marker. On the dining table, right in the middle, a vanilla candle in a glass jar was burning, its little flame flickering in the draft from the open door.
I set my bag down very slowly on the floor. Then I took out my phone and called my father.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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