I watched my father throw my clothes, my books, and the last photo of my mother into the fire like my life meant nothing. Then he looked at me and said, “This is what happens when you disobey me.” I said nothing. Six years later, I called him and whispered, “Check your mailbox.”

What I had not let myself say out loud, even to Nate, was how certain I was that he would do exactly this. He had taken things from me my whole life. The fire was just the first time he admitted what he was doing.

The fire.

I remember the details the way I remember anything that gets burned into you from the outside: the late-summer heat sitting in the air like a weight, the dry crackling sound of paper catching and curling, the chemical smell when the laptop housing softened and warped, the flat metallic ring of my belt buckle hitting the inside of the barrel. My father standing there with his arms crossed and a look on his face that I recognized as pride. He thought he was teaching me something permanent.

What he didn’t know was that I had already moved the things that mattered.