When my father died last spring, silence didn’t arrive all at once. It crept in slowly, filling corners of the house where his voice used to live. The mornings were the hardest. He had always woken before me, humming tunelessly while flipping pancakes, insisting they were “perfectly golden” even when they were slightly burnt. After my mother passed when I was eight, he became everything—parent, cheerleader, anchor. For nearly a decade, it was just the two of us learning how to be a family of two, learning grief in small manageable pieces. Then Carla entered our lives. She married my dad when I was sixteen, and from the beginning, something about her felt brittle, like glass stretched too thin. She smiled often, but her smiles never warmed the room. Her perfume lingered long after she left, sharp and floral, overpowering the comforting scent of cedar that clung to my dad’s jackets. When his heart failed suddenly, the world fractured. I remember gripping the hospital bed rail while doctors spoke in careful voices, and I remember looking at Carla, waiting for her face to break the way mine had.