MY STEPMOTHER MADE ME GIVE MY HALLOWEEN COSTUME TO HER DAUGHTER—AND MY OWN FATHER CALLED ME SELFISH FOR WANTING TO KEEP IT

I carried the package back to my bedroom, sat down on the edge of the wrought-iron bed, and carefully untied the yellow string. The butcher paper fell away to reveal a small, leather-bound notebook with a dark red cover—not the blue ledger Sarah had given me at the bank, but something older, worn at the corners where it had been shoved into the side pocket of a tool bag or the bottom of a dresser drawer.

I opened the cover.

*May 14, 2021.*

The handwriting was shaky, different from the sharp, confident notes in the blue ledger. It looked like someone had been writing while lying down in a hospital bed with an IV drip in their arm.

*Tom thinks I don't know about the loan from his brother in Midland,* my mother had written. *He thinks selling my grandmother’s cedar chest will pay off the credit cards he ran up behind my back to keep up with the country club crowd. He wants a Westlake life on a plumber’s salary, and he’s willing to sell everything I inherited from Corpus Christi to buy Karen a designer handbag.*

I turned the page.

*Lily is nine today. I gave her the silver-trimmed belt. She looked so proud wearing it around the living room, pretending she was walking down a runway in Paris. Tom told her she looked ridiculous. He said she was too clumsy to wear satin. I told him he didn't know the first thing about raising a girl who actually had her mother’s spine.*

A photograph slipped out from between the pages and fluttered down onto the hardwood floor.

I leaned over and picked it up. It was a Polaroid taken in our old backyard before the Slaughter Lane house was even finished—back when the pecan tree was still a sapling and my mother was healthy, her hair falling over her shoulders in dark waves, holding me by the hands while I wore a homemade paper crown covered in aluminum foil.

On the back of the Polaroid, written in Dad’s messy, block-letter handwriting from ten years ago, were six words:

*We're going to make it, Helen.*

Below it, in my mother’s sharp ink: *Not if you keep lying to yourself, Tom.*

I sat there in the dark room as the headlights of cars passing on Barton Springs Road swept across the ceiling in long, silent arcs. The red journal wasn't an accounting ledger. It wasn't a list of receipts or bank routing numbers. It was a roadmap of a slow-motion train wreck—a marriage destroyed not by a sudden explosion, but by a thousand small compromises where my father traded his family’s dignity for a four-bedroom mortgage and a woman who threw away children's costumes because they didn't fit her aesthetic.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand.

It was a text message from an unknown number with a Ben White Boulevard area code.