“I just wanted to hear you say it,” I said. “Goodbye, Dad.”
In the hallway, a nurse flagged me down. “You’re the younger daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Your sister came by last week,” the nurse whispered. “He refused to see her. He told security to remove her. He said he couldn’t look at her face without seeing what she did to you.”
I paused. After all these years, the Golden Child was finally the exile. It was too late to fix our family, but there was a grim kind of justice in it.
I walked out of the nursing home and into the crisp October air. It wasn’t raining anymore. The leaves were turning gold and crimson.
Colin was waiting for me back in Boston with takeout and a bad movie queued up on Netflix.
“How did it go?” he asked when I walked in, dropping my keys on the counter.
I leaned into him, smelling the rain on my own coat. “I think I’m finally done,” I said. “I think the story is over.”
Next spring, we are getting married in Grandma Dorothy’s backyard. She is eighty years old and still threatening people who cross her. She is planning the menu. Meatloaf is mandatory.
Somewhere, Karen is working a night shift, wondering where her life went wrong. My father is staring at a wall in a nursing home.
But me? I have a band poster framed in my office—the same one I wanted at fifteen. I paid too much for it on eBay, but that’s not the point.
The point is that I survived the storm. And I found my way home.
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