It wasn’t that her father said it every day. He didn’t have to. He had upgraded to something more efficient than cruelty: indifference, deployed with precision.
Her father, Ed Moreno, used to be a man who laughed loud and lifted his daughters onto his shoulders at summer fairs. That man might as well have died alongside Lily’s mother. The man who remained moved through the house like he was always late for something important. He talked about optics. Reputation. The way people saw them.
It was almost funny in a bitter way—how much he obsessed over sight in a house that treated blindness like a stain.
Clarissa and Amara had grown into the kind of young women strangers described in quick, jealous phrases. So pretty. So graceful. So lucky. Their father treated them like living trophies. Lily was treated like the velvet cloth you threw over the trophy case when guests arrived.
When company came, Lily was guided to her room, the door closed gently as though she might break. She could hear the laughter downstairs, the clink of glasses, the way her sisters’ voices rose and dipped like practiced music. Sometimes she could even smell it: citrus from cocktails, perfume, roasted meat and butter.
And she’d sit on her bed and trace the raised dots of her Braille prayer book, reading the same words over and over until they stopped sounding like comfort and started sounding like a dare.
On the morning of her twenty-first birthday, she woke before dawn.
The house was quiet—no footsteps, no kitchen noise, no radio. The kind of stillness that made you listen to your own breathing.
Lily sat up, found her slippers with her toes, and moved through the familiar path from bed to dresser to chair. She ran her fingers over the book on her nightstand, the cover worn soft from years of touch. Her mother’s book, really. Lily had claimed it the way some kids claimed stuffed animals.
She was halfway down the first page when she heard her bedroom door open.
