Chapter 1

The memory was a raw wound, always fresh, always bleeding.

It started so simply, with Jessica, my high school roommate, asking to stay at our house.

"My family's going through some stuff," she'd said, eyes wide and innocent, "and with David's big exams coming up, I thought I could help keep things calm, maybe cook a little."

A school break, right before David, my older brother, was set for his SATs, his gateway to an Ivy League dream.

Mom and Dad, proud and trusting, welcomed her.

Then the nightmare.

Jessica, screaming in the night.

Accusations.

David, she claimed, had come into her room, had touched her, had tried to...

It was a lie, a monstrous, venomous lie.

But it stuck.

David's exams were a blur of confusion and shame.

His scores, once stellar, plummeted.

The school, quick to protect its reputation, expelled him.

No Ivy League, no decent college at all.

His spirit, once so bright, just...broke.

He found work, a dangerous, low-wage job on a construction site, the kind of job no one dreams of.

An accident, they called it. A faulty scaffold. He was gone.

Mom and Dad withered, grief eating them from the inside out. They didn't last long after David.

And Jessica?

She stayed.

She' d woven herself into the fabric of our ruined home, a parasite feeding off the scraps of our family' s remaining resources, playing the victim, the survivor.

I saw her, every day, her false sympathy a constant torment.

The hatred inside me grew, a cold, hard thing.

It ended in fire, a confrontation, an accident they said, but I knew.

Jessica and I, gone together.

That was the end of that life.