That money was my way out. My ticket to a new life. And he took it. He kicked in my door, dug through my things, and stole it. Just so he could hand over some crumpled bills to a club he claims is his family while ignoring the daughter standing right in front of him.
Now I have nothing.
Happy birthday to me.
Chapter 18
Candace
Theweightofitall sinks into my bones, concrete-heavy, suffocating, inescapable. The kind that settles in your marrow and makes even breathing feel like betrayal. But it’s not despair that rises next. It’s fury. Pure, blistering rage that ignites every nerve ending, a match to gasoline.
My breath hitches, sharp and ragged, a single note of defiance rising inside me. My ribs tighten with the force of it, lungs coiling, bracing for war. I grab the baseball bat from beside my bed, my fingers curling tight around the grip. Wood against skin. Cold. Familiar. The varnish slicks against my palms, biting into the soft flesh, a reminder of every time I’ve picked it up and done nothing.
I swing it once, twice slicing the air, mimicking Harley Quinn on a warpath. Not for show. For war. The wind shrieks as it cuts around me, a low hum in my ears. The handle bites into my palms. Grounding. The first chord of a song I’ve played beforebut never finished. The vibration travels up my forearms, settles behind my teeth.
I storm into the hallway, heart thudding, footsteps silent against the cold floor, headed straight for the door I’ve avoided more times than I can count.
My father’s door is always locked. As if that could keep me out now.
I lift my leg and kick. The door shudders, cracks, splinters apart as though it’s been waiting for this reckoning. Wood groans, begging to be let go. Satisfaction hums in my chest, a battle drum. I taste blood in the back of my throat; it’s metallic, hot. I don’t know if it’s from biting my cheek or from something deeper unraveling.
A hum vibrates low in my throat before I can stop it. Not a tune. A pulse. A war beat.Mywar beat.
His room is dark. Lifeless. Sparse. Cold air clings to the walls, steeped in old secrets. But the dresser stands as a tombstone; the last relic of her. He always said the dresser was hers. Called it an heirloom. The only thing she left behind when she died.
I used to run my fingers across it when I was little, hoping it would help me remember her. It never did. All it ever held was silence. Just as he does.
Except sometimes, in the quiet, I’d make up songs about her. Whisper them to the wood grain. Stupid. Childish. But it was the only way to speak to someone who was never coming back.
I swing.
The mirror shatters with a scream of glass, shards raining down in a storm of glitter. My arms, cheek, and knuckles sting from getting sliced, but I don’t stop. I don’t care. Let it cut me. Let it bleed.
I want this room to bleed.
The lamp is next. Then the side table. The picture frame. The bat becomes an extension of my body; furious and alive. Each crash is a percussion hit. A drumbeat. A rebellion.
Then I see it.
A photo.
My dad, younger. His arm is around a pale-haired woman whose belly is stretched with me. Her. Blonde like me, but her eyes are glacier cold. There’s no warmth in that picture. No joy. No love.
Just absence.
A lyric forms in my head. “Born from absence, not from grace.” I swallow it down. No paper. No pen. Just rage.
I bring the bat down. The glass splits. The frame breaks in two. I don’t want her looking at me. Not anymore. Let her stay frozen in that photo. Let her rot there.
By the time I stop, my arms are trembling and the room is wrecked. Chaos in every direction. The air is thick with dust, with blood, with the coppery tang of rage turned feral.
It feels like the end of a song that never had a chorus. Just verses full of screaming.
I stumble back, dazed, and the bat slips from my grip. It hits the floor with a clatter, bouncing once before tumbling down the stairs. Even it wants to leave this place behind.
I slide down the hallway wall, my back scraping drywall, legs folding beneath me. My breath punches out of me in sharp bursts. Everything’s buzzing—numb and sharp at once. A wasp hive under my skin. The scream rips out before I can stop it. Raw. Feral. It tears through my throat and echoes through the house, full of every emotion I never let myself feel.
My chest caves. It’s a drumhead pulled too tight, ready to split.
