ALIX
Coffee.Not the fancy café kind with caramel drizzle and oat milk foam — real coffee. Burnt and black and strong enough to strip paint.
Then came the sound of her mother humming downstairs — some country song from the nineties that had been trapped in Helen Wolf’s rotation since dial-up internet.
Alix rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling fan spinning lazily above her. The bedroom she grew up in looked… wrong. Like someone had taken a snapshot of her teenage rebellion and fed it through a midlife crisis filter.
The posters were gone, of course. The walls were a respectable beige now, and the only thing left of her adolescence was the faint rectangle where she once tacked up a “No Boys Allowed” sign — which, in hindsight, had been more of a signal than a rule.
In its place: a treadmill. A massive BowFlex machine that looked more like a torture device. A yoga mat rolled in the corner.
Cozy. She tried not to think about what it meant that her childhood room had been completely stripped. Her parents didn’t owe her a shrine, but it would have been nice to have something more than a sad daybed covered in Paul’s hair.
She stumbled barefoot to the closet and tugged the door open, looking for her winter coat. Inside: resistance bands, Christmas décor, and a box labeled MATT’S TROPHIES. Not a single article of clothing.
“Matt has trophies?” she asked the empty room. “For fuck’s sake.”
Then she spotted the small attic hatch in the ceiling — the same one she used to climb through to hide contraband cigarettes, her worst poetry, and a small flask filled with Helen’s vodka. The Wolf family had long memories, but apparently short ceilings.
She dragged over the desk chair, testing it once before climbing up. The air that wafted down smelled like dust and insulation and Bath & Body Works Christmas candles from decades past.
When she poked her head through the hatch, sunlight filtered through the tiny gable window, catching on boxes stacked in precarious towers. One of them caught her eye — a clear plastic tub with a strip of masking tape across the front.
ALEXANDRA CLOTHES.
The full name made something in her chest go sideways. She pulled the tub toward her and popped the lid. Maybe her mom had tucked her coat in there.
Inside: the ghosts of her teenage wardrobe. Ripped jeans. Studded belts. A rhinestone tee that declared BLONDES HAVE MORE FUN (UNTIL THE SPLIT ENDS).
She laughed to herself — because of course Helen would keep this stuff. Because of course her mom would label it like a crime scene.
No coat, though. Not one decent thing for winter.
“Figures,” Alix muttered. She shook dust off the denim jacket covered in patches of bands that meant a lot to her teen angst. It was no winter coat, and it barely fit, but she called it good enough.
By the time she climbed down, her hair was full of cobwebs and her hands smelled like old fabric softener.
And then she heard it — laughter drifting up from downstairs. Bright, easy laughter. Grace’s laughter.
It hit her right in the sternum.
She followed the sound toward the kitchen. It smelled like coffee and ginger and sugar when she wandered in, trying to look like she hadn’t just had a small existential crisis in the attic.
Helen was in full command mode at the stove, flipping pancakes with militant precision. Grace — of course — was helping. Matt sat at the table scrolling through his phone. He hadn’t changed much, just grown a beard and exchanged the silk Japanese button-ups of his teen years for a holey henley.
Grace was wearing one of Helen’s flannels, sleeves rolled up, looking perfectly at home in the Wolf kitchen. Her sleek dark hair was tied back, glowing and gorgeous in the morning light.
Alix froze in the doorway, instantly aware of the dust on her jeans and the fact that her jacket looked like it had shrunk in a dryer sometime during George W. Bush’s second term.
Helen spotted her. “Morning, sweetheart. Grace tells me you don’t eat before noon, so I made you extra pancakes. Eggs are vegan, right?”
Alix paused for a moment, worried about ruining the thoughtful gesture by giving a talk about inhumane chicken treatment, when Grace cracked a smile. “She’s kidding. They’re vegan. I made sure,” Grace said.
“Gross,” Matt muttered.
Alix pinched the bridge of her nose. “I’m disowning all of you.”
Helen flipped another pancake. “That’s fine, but you’ll have to eat before you go.”
