At my stepsister’s 500-guest wedding, the same family who threw me out at sixteen let me stand in the back of the ballroom like I wasn’t even blood. Until the bride stormed across the floor, m0cked my dress, s.lapp.ed me hard enough to turn heads, and called me garbage while half the room laughed.

It began many years ago in a different house in Richmond where I learned what it felt like to be unwanted before I even knew the word for it. My mother died when I was fifteen, right when the autumn leaves were turning a bright and painful shade of yellow.

She was a gentle woman named Sarah who believed in small acts of love like ironing my clothes or singing while she cooked. When she got sick, the house seemed to grow cold and my father began to disappear into his own grief.

Geoffrey was a man who only knew how to love people when life was easy and predictable. He drove her to the hospital, but he could not handle the silence she left behind, so he started staying late at his office.

By the time Christmas arrived, he had already found someone else to fill the void. I heard Brenda’s laughter in our kitchen before I ever saw her face, and I knew right then that my mother’s memory was being erased.

Brenda was a woman who wore expensive jewelry and used a soft voice to hide the fact that she was very calculating. She brought her daughter Tessa into our home, and Tessa was exactly my age but had a much greater sense of entitlement.