The night my sister called me from a pay phone, it was five below in Minneapolis and my living room window had frosted over from the inside.
I was barefoot on the couch with a spreadsheet open, halfway through a quarterly report, when my phone lit up with an unknown number and a 507 area code. Southern Minnesota. Bus stations.
Farm towns.
Nowhere that should’ve had my number at eleven at night.
I almost let it go to voicemail.
Then the call rolled to a second ring, and a thin, shredded voice reached across ten years and said my name.
“Celeste?”
I knew who it was before she said the second word.
“It’s Monica. Please don’t hang up.”
I hadn’t heard my sister’s voice since the week I turned eighteen.
Back when she was the bright one, the golden one, the one our parents toasted with champagne while I stood ten feet away holding a smudged letter nobody bothered to read.
That was the night my father told me I was begging for attention in front of forty‑three people.
Ten years later, I stood in the glow of my own kitchen, phone pressed to my ear, and heard his favorite daughter—the future Dr. Simmons—sound like someone whose life had just been burned to the ground.
Her next sentence made my hand go cold around the phone.
“I’m at a bus station.
I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
—
My name is Celeste Simmons.
I’m twenty‑eight years old. I make my living reading numbers, but the number that still sits like a stone in my chest is forty‑three.
Forty‑three guests in my parents’ backyard the week I graduated valedictorian.
Forty‑three pairs of eyes that saw my father point his champagne flute at me and say, clear enough for the neighbors to hear, “Stop begging for attention, Celeste. Not everything is about you.”
Not one person said a word.
To understand how I ended up in a snowstorm driving toward a shivering voice at a Rochester bus station, you have to understand the house I grew up in, and the quiet places where love went missing long before the credit cards and federal statutes got involved.
We lived on Maple Ridge Drive, just outside Milwaukee.
Four bedrooms, two and a half baths, vinyl siding the color of oatmeal.
The kind of street where people mowed in diagonal lines and waved with the hand that wasn’t pushing the mower.
From the street, we were the sort of family you put on a church brochure. Gerald and Diane Simmons.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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