The last thing I noticed before my father put me out of the house was a tiny red light on the ceiling. It blinked once above the living room doorway, almost lost in the bright afternoon sunlight, while Vanessa stood behind my father with both hands pressed against her chest.
She had spent the last five minutes telling him I was dangerous. He had spent those five minutes believing her.
I was eighteen years old, with a high school diploma still a week away, and everything I owned was about to be pushed out onto the front steps.
But that little light was recording. I didn't know then whether anyone would ever watch what it had seen.
I only knew that for the first time all afternoon, Vanessa looked more frightened than I did.
My name is Jordan Ellis. Until that Sunday, I would have told you that my father and I were a team. We weren't especially good at talking about feelings, and we could disagree for an entire dinner about something as small as whose turn it was to take the trash out.
But when I was younger, he had taught me how to change a tire, how to check the oil in an engine, and how to recognize the sound of someone trying to sell me something I didn't need. He used to say that an Ellis man kept his word even when keeping it cost him something.
I believed that because I had seen him do it, especially after my mother died.
Her name was Nicole. She was a nurse, the kind who came home after a twelve-hour shift and still noticed when I had a bad day at school. She died when I was ten, so suddenly that the week before and the week after seemed to belong to different worlds.
Dad was left with a mortgage, a small construction business, and a child who kept setting an extra plate at the dinner table. For a long time it was just the two of us. He learned to braid nothing, cook three decent meals, and sit through school concerts even when he had concrete dust on his jacket.
I learned that grief could make a room feel crowded even with only two people inside it. We weren't perfect, but the house still felt like ours.
Then Vanessa came into our lives. I was sixteen when Dad introduced her at a restaurant near his office. She was beautiful, polished, and attentive in a way that made everybody feel carefully examined. She asked me about basketball, even though I had never played on the school team, and told my father she admired how close we were. When we got home, Dad looked happier than I had seen him in years. I wanted that happiness to last, so when he asked what I thought of her, I said she seemed nice. In the beginning, she usually was.