up a move-out timeline, Melissa gave me the same look, half hurt and half accusation.

‘You’re counting everything?’ she’d ask.

‘We’re your family, Ethan.’

That word family did a lot of work in my life.

Usually the kind that benefited everyone but me.

By October, I was tired in a way sleep didn’t fix.

I worked long days, came home to a crowded kitchen, and pretended not to notice that Darren had started using the phrase ‘the house’ the way a man talks about a thing already under his control.

He parked in the better spot in the driveway.

He moved my ladder without asking.

He kept referring to my garage as ‘my workspace’ when he talked to people on the phone.

Melissa corrected me once when I said I was repainting the upstairs bathroom.

‘Don’t do gray,’ she said.

‘It’ll make the place feel cold.’

The place.

Not your house.

Not Ethan’s house.

The place.

Thursday came with cold rain and the kind of sky that makes every color look older.

I left work, stopped at the supermarket, and bought enough food for the whole house because despite everything, I still did that.

I balanced two heavy grocery bags in one hand and my laptop case in the other as I crossed the driveway and climbed the porch steps.

My right foot hit the slick edge of the top step.

It slid.

I heard the crack before my body understood I was falling.

Pain exploded through my leg in a blinding white wave.

One second I was upright, thinking vaguely about soup.

The next I was on the wet boards, my ankle twisted at an angle no ankle should ever make.

A carton of eggs burst against the railing.

Oranges rolled into the rain.

My laptop case dropped into a puddle.

I screamed.

The curtains twitched.

Someone had heard me.

No one came.

Rain hit my face hard enough to sting.

Water ran down my neck and into my coat.

I tried to sit up and nearly blacked out from the pain.

Through the front window I could see the blue glow of the television across the wall.

I heard Darren laugh from inside.

I heard Melissa talking.

The house was warm and bright and less than ten feet away, and I might as well have been shouting from a ditch.

‘Melissa!’ I yelled.

‘Help me!’

The door finally opened.

Melissa stood there in gray sweatpants with a coffee mug in her hand, steam rising into the cold air.

She didn’t look worried.

She looked interrupted.

‘What now?’ she asked.

‘I fell,’ I said through clenched teeth.

‘I think I broke my ankle.

Call an ambulance.’

Her eyes dropped to the broken groceries on the porch.

‘Did the eggs break?’

Even now, that question feels more violent than anything Darren said.

‘Melissa,’ I said, and my voice cracked.

‘Call an ambulance.’

Darren stepped into the doorway behind her, chewing chips.

He looked at the rain, looked at my leg, and exhaled in annoyance.

‘Man, it’s pouring,’ he said.

‘Can’t you get up?’

I tried to push up on one elbow and pain detonated through me so hard I nearly vomited.

Behind them, Cody appeared in the hallway, looked at me for half a second, then looked back at his