By the time my phone lit up with the seventeenth missed call, the takeout container on my coffee table had gone cold and the ice in my water glass had melted into a pale ring. Lauren. Lauren.
Lauren. The same name stacked down my screen like a warning label. My sister had never called me this many times in one night in her entire life.
Growing up, she used to yell my name from across the house if she needed something, not dial it. Outside my apartment window, the traffic on Glenwood Avenue in Raleigh hummed with its usual Friday night restlessness. Somewhere down the block, a siren wailed and then faded.
The glow from my laptop cast a soft blue over the tiny living room I paid for myself, a room no one had ever accused of being a mistake. The last voicemail notification blinked at me. My thumb hovered over it.
“Camille, please pick up,” Lauren’s voice crackled through the speaker when I finally pressed play. She sounded nothing like the girl who used to make pronouncements at our parents’ dinner table like a judge delivering a verdict. “It’s about the house.
It’s… it’s serious. They’re saying I signed something I didn’t understand. They’re talking about liens and defaults.
I need you. Call me back.”
My eyes drifted to the other screen that was still open on my laptop. My mother’s Facebook page glowed back at me, the pinned post from three weeks ago sitting smugly at the top.
All five of them in front of the house I grew up in, under rented string lights and a custom banner that said THE THOMPSON FAMILY REUNION in big looping letters. Matching navy shirts. White jeans.
Champagne flutes mid-air. Not an empty chair in sight. Family is everything, Mom had captioned it, followed by a parade of heart emojis and a hashtag with our last name.
Everything. I took a slow sip of my water and let the glass rest against my bottom lip. The last time I’d sat at that dining table, my sister had looked me in the eye and said I never should have been there at all.
—
Three weeks earlier, the roast chicken had been overcooked. Mom would have blamed the oven, but I knew it was because she spent the entire afternoon fussing over the centerpiece on the dining room table. She’d arranged eucalyptus branches around cream pillar candles, then rearranged them, then texted Lauren a picture to ask if the runners looked “too beige.”
