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I shove myself up on my knees, drag myself up the steps, slam into the door and yank the knob.

Locked.

The doorknob is different. There’s dust on the basement stairs and a screw forgotten by the molding. Chips in the door’s paint left by some cheap handyman Mom must’ve hired to get it done quick.

On the other side of the door, Mom groans. “You scratched me.”

“Mom?” I sound pathetic. The way I did when I turned to her during the interview. “Open the door.”

I hear her footsteps, see the shadow of her feet under the door—moving this way, then that. Quiet thumping. I press myself to the stairs, trying to look through the tiny crack.

“Open the door?” she repeats, like it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever said. “No.”

I’m going to throw up. “Please?”

Her shadow moves closer. She’s standing right there, and I can make out the details on the oxfords shoes. My oxfords. The ones I took off and left by the door.

“Did you hear what happened?” Mom says. “To Daniel? Turns out he’s in the hospital.”

There’s a moment where I stare blankly. In horror. Trying to figure out how the news has gotten to her already. But why wouldn’t it have? It’s been an hour since I called 911. Maybe longer. And Mom is nothing if she isn’t plugged in—if she isn’t on top of everything.

“In surgery now,” she continues. “Poor thing.”

I swallow down bile. “That—um. I hope he’s okay.”

“No, you don’t.” Mom takes another step forward, with my shoes. “The knife fell out of your pocket. I saw the way you’ve been looking at him. I can put the pieces together. You’re so much like your father, but you can’t even manage to be good at it.”

Don’t collapse. Don’t collapse. Don’t.

Mom says, “Greg doesn’t know it was you. Or, if he does, he hasn’t said anything to me. But he did tell me that he’s considering killing the project. He’s thinking about it. He might have to. And I thought, right. Exactly. That’s exactly what you want, isn’t it, Morgan. Because you’re selfish. Oh my god, you can’t even keep it together long enough to get half a million dollars. You don’t care about how hard this has been for me. I have to keep—I have to keep up the mortgages, and pay the lawyers, and make sure your father has enough in the commissary to eat, and—”

I do not point out that she could sell the penthouse. Sell this town house and find someplace infinitely cheaper. Leave Dad to fend for himself. Get a job. But she’d rather be homeless before she gives up the life she built.

There’s a version of the world, I think, where she knew what Dad was doing. Where she knew what he was doing to me and turned away from it, pretended she didn’t know, because it meant getting to keep this life. The life she worked so hard for, prayed for every night as a kid. But the version we have is this one, where she didn’t know, and she hates me for breaking her ignorance. I’m the one that spoke up and ruined everything.

On the other side of the door, Mom takes a shuddering breath.

“So I’m going to handle it,” Mom says. “Because apparently I have to do everything around here.”

No. No, she can’t leave. She can’t leave me here.

I try the doorknob again, as if it’s changed somehow. Slide my hands along the threshold looking for hinges to unscrew. Throw my weight against it.

“Mom.” Rattle the door. “Mom, please.“

She doesn’t answer. She’s going around the house: up the stairs, back down the stairs. I hear the switchblade open, Mom making a tiny noise of surprise, then a huff of confusion when, I assume, it takes her a second to figure out how to close it.

“Open the door.”

She says, “You’ll figure it out eventually, right?”

It’s sturdy. Heavy. When I slam my shoulder into the wood, it barely moves.

“Open the fucking door!”

I look through the crack under the door again, and her feet aren’t there. She’s gone.

Dad installed—what was it? Ten, fifteen dead bolts on the penthouse’s bedroom door. He’d already swapped the door handle so it locked from the outside, not the inside, but apparently that wasn’t enough. He drilled a new one into place every time he got paranoid or a girl used herself as a battering ram to the point of dislocating shoulders and tearing up joint sockets. I remember the shrieking whirl of the power tools every time he put up a new lock, and the rhythmic clack click-clack of him undoing the bolts all in a line.