I Bought a Manor to End Their Game
I used to get forgotten on December 25th so often that I finally stopped reminding them. This year, I bought an old manor to gift myself some peace. But the next morning, two black SUVs pulled up with a locksmith ready to crack the gate.
They think I purchased this place to live here, but they’re wrong. I bought this estate to finally end their game of forgetting me. My name is Clare Lopez.
At thirty-five years old, I had become a statistician of my own misery, calculating the probability of parental affection with the same cold detachment I applied to my work at Hian Risk and Compliance. In my profession, we deal in the currency of liability and exposure. We tell massive conglomerates which corners they can cut without bringing the whole structure down.
It’s a job that requires a certain numbness, an ability to look at a disaster and see only paperwork. It was a skill set I had unknowingly been honing since I was seven years old—the first year my parents, Graham and Marilyn, forgot to set a place for me at the Christmas dinner table. Back then, it was an accident—or so they said.
A frantic mother, a distracted father, a golden-child younger brother named Derek who demanded every ounce of oxygen in the room. I sat on the stairs that year clutching a plastic reindeer, watching them eat roast beef and laugh. I accepted it because I was seven and I had no other currency but their approval.
But the “accidents” kept happening. They became a tradition as reliable as the tree or the stockings. I was forgotten when they booked plane tickets for a family vacation to Aspen when I was sixteen.
I was forgotten when they planned a graduation dinner for Derek but somehow missed my own ceremony two years prior. The forgetting was not a lapse in memory. It was a weapon.
It was a way of telling me exactly where I stood in the Caldwell family hierarchy without ever saying the words out loud. I was the safety net. The one they called when Derek crashed his car and needed bail money, or when Graham needed a signature on a loan document.
They remembered me perfectly when they needed something. It was only when it came time to give love or space or even a simple meal that my existence became hazy. Last year was the breaking point.
I had driven four hours through a blinding sleet storm to get to their house in Connecticut. December 24th. I had not been invited, but I had not been uninvited either.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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