They Drank My Father’s Champagne and Toasted My Death. They Forgot Whose Daughter I Am

Below me, drifting up the stairwell from the lower deck — the bright, delicate clink of champagne flutes touching.

And then laughter.

Easy laughter.

Celebratory.

The sound of people very pleased with themselves.

There was no reason for that sound to frighten me, and it did.

I remember sitting on that step trying to talk myself out of the cold that was climbing my spine — telling myself it was only Flynn and his parents having a drink, that his mother laughed like that at everything, that the drug was making me morbid and strange.

All true, all reasonable, and none of it touched the thing my body already knew.