When Emma’s stepmother shredded the skirt she’d crafted from her late father’s ties, calling it “hideous,” Emma thought her heart couldn’t break any further. But the same night, police lights flooded their driveway, and an officer’s words revealed something unexpected. Had karma finally arrived?
When my dad died last spring, the entire world went completely quiet. He was the one who made everything in my life feel steady and safe. The morning pancakes with far too much syrup, the corny jokes that made me groan but secretly smile, and the “you can do anything, sweetheart” pep talks before every test and tryout.
After Mom passed away from cancer when I was just eight years old, it had been just me and him for nearly a decade, until he married Carla. Carla, my stepmother, was like a walking ice storm. She wore expensive designer perfume that smelled like cold flowers, offered fake smiles, and kept her nails filed into perfect points like tiny knives.
When Dad died suddenly from a heart attack, she didn’t shed a single tear at the hospital. Not a single one. At the funeral, while I was shaking so hard I could barely stand at the graveside, she leaned close and whispered in my ear, “You’re embarrassing yourself in front of everyone.
Stop crying so much. He’s gone. It happens to everyone eventually.”
At that point, I wanted to scream at her.
I wanted to tell her that the pain I was feeling was something she could never understand. But my throat was so dry that I couldn’t speak at all. Two weeks after we buried him, she started cleaning out his closet like she was purging evidence of a crime.
“There’s no point in keeping all this junk around,” she said, tossing his beloved ties into a black trash bag without even looking at them. I rushed into the room as my heart pounded inside my chest. “They’re not junk, Carla.
They’re his. Please don’t throw them away.”
She rolled her eyes dramatically. “Sweetheart, he’s not coming back for them.
You need to grow up and face reality.”
When she left the room to answer her phone, I rescued the bag and hid it in my closet. Every single tie still smelled faintly of his aftershave, that familiar scent of cedar and the cheap cologne he bought at the drugstore. I wasn’t going to let her throw my dad’s belongings as if they didn’t matter at all.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
TAP → NEXT PAGE → 👇
