The day my mother walked my ex-boyfriend into my baby shower, she was smiling like she’d finally found a way to erase everything good that had happened to me.

Chapter 1

Forty minutes later, that smile was gone, her husband had thrown her out of their home, her favorite daughter wouldn’t look at her, and four women she’d spent twenty years trying to impress were leaving without saying goodbye. The strangest part was that the man who destroyed her carefully polished life was the same man she’d secretly invited to destroy mine.

I had never been allowed to call Lorna “Mom.” When I was four, I tried once, and she crouched in front of me with a look I can still see clearly almost thirty years later. She told me “Mommy” was a name children used when their mothers had wanted them, and I should call her Lorna because there was no reason to pretend.

Lorna had been nineteen when she got pregnant with me. My biological father, Warren, was twenty-one and stayed involved from the moment he learned about the pregnancy, but he refused to marry her because he wasn’t in love with her. He offered support, promised to be my father, and told her he wouldn’t build a marriage on a lie.

She never forgave him.

More importantly, she never forgave me.

Every Friday at six, Warren pulled into our driveway to pick me up. Lorna would stand in the doorway accusing him of being late when he wasn’t, complaining that he hadn’t bought enough clothes when he had, or warning me that he only spent time with me because he wanted people to think he was a good father. When I was little, I believed her because children tend to believe the adult who controls breakfast, bedtime, and the roof over their heads.

As I grew older, her story stopped matching the man I knew. Warren never missed a school play, a soccer game, or a parent-teacher conference. He taught me to ride a bicycle, stayed all night in the emergency room when I broke my wrist, and called every birthday at midnight because he wanted to be the first person to tell me I mattered.

When I was seven, Lorna married Glenn. He was an electrician with rough hands, an easy laugh, and the habit of humming old Johnny Cash songs whenever he fixed something around the house. He never tried to replace Warren, but he treated me with a kindness that felt almost shocking.

Then my half sister, Tessa, was born.

I loved her from the moment Glenn placed her in my arms, but I also understood immediately that Lorna had finally gotten the daughter she wanted. Tessa had a lavender nursery with her name painted over the crib. I slept on a mattress in the spare room beside boxes of Christmas decorations.

Tessa got ballet, piano, pageants, new clothes, and elaborate birthday parties. I got hand-me-downs, forgotten birthdays, and the reminder that if I wanted anything more, I should ask Warren.

One November when I turned twelve, Lorna forgot my birthday completely. At nine that night, Glenn realized what day it was, drove to a gas station, and came home with a cupcake. He found a candle in the kitchen junk drawer, lit it, and sang to me while Lorna watched television in the next room.

I have received expensive gifts in my adult life.

None has ever meant more than that cupcake.

Tessa and I somehow stayed close. She was never cruel to me, and as she got older, I realized she was trapped in Lorna’s expectations in a different way. Being the unwanted daughter hurt, but being the golden child came with a rule of its own: Tessa was required to remain perfect.

College was the first place where I discovered what breathing freely felt like. Warren and Glenn moved me into my dorm because Lorna had a pageant with Tessa that weekend, even though she’d known my move-in date for months. Tessa, eleven years old and already understanding more than she should have, slipped a glitter-covered card into my suitcase that read, “Don’t forget me.”

I didn’t.

During my junior year, I met Ryan Mercer in a statistics class. He was funny, warm, and capable of making conversation with anyone from a professor to the woman serving mashed potatoes in the cafeteria. What I loved most was that he noticed things.

He noticed when I got quiet after speaking to Lorna. He noticed that I apologized too often. He noticed that compliments made me uncomfortable because some part of me was always waiting for the insult that came afterward.

By graduation, we’d been together almost two years.

That was when Lorna met him.

At lunch after the ceremony, she studied Ryan as though I had somehow stolen something valuable.

“I’m shocked,” she said brightly in front of Warren, Glenn, Tessa, and half our relatives. “A handsome boy like you with a girl like her. What’s the secret? Do you feel sorry for her?”

Ryan didn’t smile.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “I think I’m the lucky one.”

Under the table, he took my hand.

That was the beginning of Lorna’s obsession with him. She added him on social media, commented on his photographs, praised his looks, and occasionally wrote things like, “I hope my daughter appreciates what she has.”

Whenever I confronted her, she called me insecure.

One evening Ryan said something I’d never considered.

“Your mother is jealous of you.”

I actually laughed.

“Of me? She barely likes me.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

He told me he’d watched Lorna’s expression whenever Warren praised me, whenever someone congratulated me, whenever Ryan put his arm around me. According to him, she didn’t see me as the daughter who ruined her life anymore.

She saw me as the woman who had somehow gotten the life she believed she deserved.

I didn’t want to believe him.

Then, about a year later, Ryan came home from work one Thursday and ended our relationship without warning.

He sat at the edge of our bed, wouldn’t look at me, and kept saying he’d “heard things.” When I begged him to tell me what things, he said he didn’t know what to believe anymore. Within days, he’d moved out.

Two weeks later, he blocked my number.

I spent years wondering what I had done.

Lorna was the only person who seemed almost pleased.

“Some men aren’t meant to stay,” she told me as she hugged me for the first time in nearly a decade. “You of all people should understand that.”

I thought she was comforting me.

Five years later, I would learn what that hug really meant.