During the divorce, my wife kept the house. “Pick up your stuff by Friday.” I arrived at night unannounced. I heard my daughter screaming from inside the deep freezer. I ripped it open—she was blue, shaking: “Grandma puts me here when I’m bad.” I saw another freezer, unplugged, locked with a padlock. My daughter whispered: “Don’t open that one, Daddy…”

Taylor got the house. I got a one-room apartment over a laundromat, a futon that smelled faintly of detergent and somebody else’s cigarettes, and every other weekend with our daughter as long as everyone, as Taylor liked to say, stayed civil.

That morning she had texted me: Pick up your stuff by Friday. I’m throwing out whatever’s left.

No softness. No punctuation. Just a final notice.

So after my shift, I drove there without telling her. The plan was simple. Park. Load the boxes stacked in the garage. Avoid the house. Avoid the rooms I no longer had any right to stand in. Avoid her mother, Evelyn, if possible. Leave before memory got teeth.

The garage door was open when I pulled in. Light poured out in a hard yellow slab across the driveway. Taylor’s car was gone. Her mother’s sedan sat under the streetlight, dented bumper catching the glow.

Evelyn.