I stood in the entryway with the new key still in my hand when Jason Reed pointed at my front door and said,
“This is my house. Get out.”
The words hit me before the ocean air had even left my coat, before I had taken one full breath inside the home I had purchased that morning with my own money, before the small private joy I had carried up Highway 1 had time to settle into the walls. Jason stood in the middle of my living room with his chest pushed forward, one hand aimed toward the door and the other balled into a fist at his side, as if he had been waiting all afternoon for the chance to throw me out of the one place in the world I had finally bought for myself.
Behind him, my sister Natalie sat on my cream linen sofa with her legs crossed, sipping iced coffee from a paper cup that was sweating all over the wooden side table I had spent forty minutes choosing at the design center. She did not look startled. She did not look ashamed.
She looked comfortable, and somehow that comfort made my stomach turn colder than Jason’s yelling did. Her children were racing barefoot across my new rug, shrieking as they tossed the pillows I had ordered from a little shop in Carmel-by-the-Sea as if they were beach balls. Snack bags lay torn open on the floor.
Orange cracker crumbs had been crushed into the seams of the sofa. A sticky juice carton had tipped over beside the fireplace, leaving a dark stain along the pale stone hearth. The television was blasting some cartoon I had never seen before, loud enough to rattle against the high ceiling.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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