My father remarried just eighty-nine days after my mother passed away.

I know the exact number because I counted it—first when the wedding invitation arrived with gold lettering and a photo of him beside a woman I had barely met, and again the night he told me I should “be mature” and give up my bedroom to her daughter.

Her name was Lorna. Her daughter, Madison, was fifteen—loud, entitled, and already calling my house in Cedar Rapids “ours” before the wedding gifts were even opened. I was seventeen, still sleeping in the pale blue room my mom had painted years ago, still waking up expecting to hear her in the kitchen. My grief hadn’t settled—it felt raw, like something alive under my skin.

But my dad didn’t seem to notice.

He stood in my doorway and said, “Madison needs stability. You’re almost an adult—you can move into the den.”

The den had no door, no closet, and no privacy. It was where he watched TV late at night and where guests dropped their bags.

“You want me to give her Mom’s room?” I asked.

He frowned. “It’s not your mother’s room. It’s just a bedroom.”

But to me, it was everything. That house still held traces of my mom—her medicine tucked away, the shape she left in the recliner, the scarf she never came back for. He was trying to layer a new life over the old one before the old one had even faded.

Lorna stepped in with a soft voice. “No one is trying to erase anything. We all just need to adjust.”

Everyone.

Except them.

So I said okay.