The air smelled like cut grass, expensive cologne, and the lemon furniture polish my mother used whenever she expected company. A few birds shifted in the hedge. Somewhere down the block a lawnmower droned faintly.
My father stared at me like I had climbed out of a grave wearing somebody else’s life.
I wasn’t in my janitor uniform anymore.
That alone would have unsettled them. For three years I had been so consistent in the same faded work pants, same navy maintenance shirts, same scuffed boots, that I had become a fixed object in their imagination. A thing. A role. Not a person capable of revision. That morning I wore a charcoal suit tailored properly through the shoulders, a white shirt, no tie, black shoes that actually fit, and my grandfather’s silver watch at my wrist. I hadn’t chosen any of it for them. I’d chosen it because I was done dressing like an apology.
Jace straightened away from the BMW first.
“What the hell,” he muttered.
My mother’s hand flew to her throat, not from emotion but reflex, the way some women touch jewelry before they speak. Her eyes went from the car to Helena to me and back again, hunting for the version of events that restored hierarchy.