My parents forgot me every Christmas until I bought a manor. They showed up with a locksmith and a fake lease to steal it. But they didn’t know I had filled the dark house with police and reporters waiting for them to break down the door.
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 are 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 Hion 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 and which cracks in the foundation will inevitably lead to a collapse.
It is 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.
When they finally noticed me an hour later, the excuse was flimsy. They said they thought I was napping.
They said I was so quiet they simply lost track of me.
I accepted it because I was seven and I had no other currency but their approval. But the accidents kept happening.
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