A picture I remembered because I’d hated it when it was taken. I’d been twenty-one, forced into the frame by my mother’s insistence that we needed “a nice family photo.” I’d smiled because that’s what you do when you still believe smiling will earn you safety.
I froze so hard the coffee mug nearly slipped from my fingers.
My father’s voice echoed through my phone, amplified by the church microphone.
“She was always a troubled girl,” he said. “But we loved her. We did everything we could.”
My vision blurred.
He was reading a eulogy.
My obituary.
“Though she left this world far too young,” my father continued, voice steady, “we pray her soul finally finds peace.”
What?
I wasn’t dead.
I was standing in my apartment, alive, breathing, shaking so hard my teeth clicked.
This couldn’t be real.
I scrubbed the timeline back. Played it again. And again. Their faces didn’t change. Their voices didn’t shake from real grief. They were calm. Controlled. Performing.
I gripped the edge of the kitchen counter until my fingers hurt.
“What the hell is going on?” I whispered aloud, as if the room could answer.
Why were they doing this?
I hadn’t spoken to them in years, but a funeral? A whole church service? A casket? A photograph of me like I was already buried?
My mother mentioned my “tragic accident.” My father talked about my “final years spent in isolation.”
There was no accident. No isolation. I was working. Living. Surviving.
They knew that. They had to.
So why?
I watched until the end, my mind numb with disbelief, and the camera panned across the mourners.
Distant relatives. Family friends. Even my childhood piano teacher, Mrs. Molina, who used to smell like lavender and always told me my hands were “too strong” for delicate pieces. Everyone dressed in black, heads bowed, believing I was gone.
Dead.
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