because you suddenly feel delicate.”

So I climbed.

The attic ladder was narrow and shaky.

I was carrying a heavy plastic bin against my chest while Amanda stood below me, one hand on the ladder and the other on her phone.

Halfway down, she turned to answer a call from a bridesmaid and let go.

The ladder shifted.

Everything after that happened inside one awful second—the slide, the box slipping from my hands, the crack against the wall, the floor rising too fast.

When I opened my eyes, I was on the hallway floor gasping like I had been punched.

My right wrist was bent in a way wrists should never bend.

Pain tore through my lower left leg every time I tried to move.

Amanda stood over me, pale and furious.

Not frightened.

Furious.

“Oh my God, Ruth,” she snapped.

“Could you be any more careless?”

At the emergency room, the X-rays showed a fractured wrist and a broken fibula near my ankle.

The doctor put my arm in a cast, fitted my leg with a brace and boot, handed me crutches, and told me to rest for several weeks.

Dad looked genuinely shaken in the hospital.

For one moment, I thought maybe this would force him to see something.

Amanda sat beside him holding his hand and saying all the right things.

She called me poor thing.

She said she felt awful.

She told the nurse she would personally make sure I was comfortable at home.

That performance lasted less than twenty-four hours.

By the second afternoon, she was dropping bridal magazines on my bed.

“Since you’re resting anyway, you can compare centerpieces,” she said.

The next day it was guest addresses.

The day after that, vendor emails.

When I said the pain medication made me dizzy, she crossed her arms and hissed, “Broken doesn’t mean useless.

Stop acting spoiled.”

I was hobbling to the bathroom on crutches while she criticized my response times to florists.

I was sleeping badly from pain while she texted me at midnight asking whether ivory or cream looked better on folded napkins.

Once, while Dad was in the garage, she stood in my doorway and said, very quietly, “The minute I marry your father, this house is going to stop revolving around your mother’s ghost.”

That sentence did something to me.

Not because it was the cruelest thing she had said, although it came close.

It was because of the confidence in it.

Amanda did not act like a woman joining a family.

She acted like a woman taking possession of one.

A coworker from the café told me to start documenting everything.

I almost laughed, because the suggestion made my life sound like a lawsuit instead of a home.

But that night I started saving Amanda’s texts.

Then I started taking screenshots.

Twice I turned on the voice memo app when I knew Dad was out.

I did not feel brave.

I felt desperate.

Then my grandmother called.

Helen was my mother’s mother, and she possessed the kind of calm that could make other people sit straighter without knowing why.

She asked how my recovery was going.

I said fine.

The word cracked halfway out of my mouth.

She went quiet for one beat, then said, “I’ll be there tomorrow.”

Amanda