apartment. Those two weeks quickly turned into two full years.
Because my mother was soft-hearted and deeply protective of her children, she never told me the truth during our weekly video calls. Whenever we spoke, she would position her tablet camera to show only her smiling face, insisting everything was wonderful, that the house was lovely, that she was so grateful,
so happy, so blessed to finally have some peace. I believed her completely. Why wouldn’t I? I had built that house specifically so she could finally rest, and hearing her voice sound content on those calls was the thing that got me through the worst weeks of desert heat and homesickness.
In reality, Kloe and Julian had systematically taken over the entire house. They moved into the master suite, relegated my mother to a small windowless room near the garage, the kind of space originally meant for storage or a workbench, and commandeered her monthly three-thousand-dollar allowance to
