I used to watch my stepmom stand in front of the mirror every morning, clipping on her thrift-store earrings with this quiet kind of pride. She never owned anything fancy, but she carried herself like she did. My stepsister, Alicia, never let her forget it.“Mom looks like a cheap Christmas tree,” she’d laugh, loud enough for the neighbors to hear. wasn’t close to my stepmom—she came into my life when I was ten—but I never disrespected her. She tried. She really did.

And since my biological mom walked out when I was two, my stepmom was the closest thing I had to a mother, even if we didn’t always understand each other.When she died in her sleep, I was seventeen. The house felt hollow, like something sacred had been scraped out of it. Alicia didn’t even wait for the grief to settle; the day after the funeral, she told my dad and me to pack our things and get out. Her mother’s name was on the deed, and she made sure we remembered it.