Chapter 3

“Where did you find that old rag, Mom?” Bianca looked down, a faint smirk on her lips. “I hope Alicia wasn’t saving it for something.”

“Keep your feet up,” Mom told her. “It’s finally being put to use.”

“What if she gets furious and blames me for this?” Bianca asked, slipping back into that small, wounded voice.

“She can be furious.” Dad came down the stairs, his expression dark.

“I had accounting check her card. Not a single charge since yesterday.”

He stopped beside the sofa. “I’m done playing.”

Dad sent a voice message to our family group chat.

“Alicia, you have until eight tonight to come home. After that, don’t expect the gates to open for you.”

No reply appeared.

“She’s trying to make us worry. Don’t give her the satisfaction.” Luca sneered. “Cut her off, Dad. Give it three days. She’ll come running home in tears, begging us to forgive her.”

I had already been dead for two days.

I looked down at my translucent fingers. Police had taken my body out of the basement. I didn’t know where it was now, or who would come for me.

But my family was still here, deciding how to make me apologize.

They would never hear it.

Luca glanced down the hallway and scoffed.

“If she’s so determined to leave, she doesn’t need us keeping a room for her.”

Bianca followed his gaze.

“You said you needed somewhere for your dresses.” Luca turned to her. “The ones you don’t have space for upstairs.”

“My gowns?”

“We’ll put in proper rails and mirrors. You can use it for fittings.”

Bianca’s eyes lit up, but then she hesitated.

“Are you sure? Alicia will be so upset when she comes home and finds her room gone. I don’t want another fight.”

“A fight?” Mom scoffed. “This house belongs to us. We pay for everything she has. What right does she have to complain?”

She turned to Luca.

“Have someone clear it out. Throw away all that junk.”

Within minutes, people were carrying my things out of the room.

I stood in the hallway and watched.

My room was small, with one window overlooking the service drive. When trucks arrived early in the morning, their headlights swept across my bed.

I’d once had a bigger room upstairs. But Bianca said she had nightmares whenever I slept nearby. In her dreams, I kept asking why she had stolen Mom, Dad, and Luca’s love from me.

So they moved me down here.

This little room was all I had left.

One woman took my clothes off their hangers. Another pulled the books from my shelves.

A paperback fell open on the floor. Someone stepped on it while carrying out my bedding.

I no longer tried to stop them.

“Mr. Luca?”

A maid stood beside the covered easel in the corner.

“What would you like us to do with this?”

Luca barely looked up from his phone.

“Get rid of it.”

She lifted the dust sheet.

Underneath was his birthday present.

I had finished it before the night I died. Ten evenings of working until my eyes ached, trying to get his expression right.

I’d painted him from an old photograph: Luca at seventeen, on the basketball court behind the house, smiling at someone outside the frame.

Bianca.

She had been holding the camera. I’d been standing beside her, carrying their shopping bags.

Luca had taken us to the mall that afternoon, then stopped at the court on the way home. Although he’d spent most of the day talking to Bianca, I still remembered it as a day out with my brother.

She turned the canvas toward him.

“It’s a portrait, sir.”

Luca glanced at it.

For a second, his eyes stayed on the painted face.

Then Bianca appeared in the doorway.

“Oh. She painted you.”

Luca looked away.

“Put it with the rest.”

The maid lifted the canvas off the easel. As she turned, its edge caught the metal corner of an open drawer.

The fabric tore.

A short, ugly sound.

I looked at the tear running through his shoulder in the painting.

The men who broke into my studio had slashed several of my paintings that night, too.

For a moment, I had worried more about the ruined canvases than about getting out. Then one of them caught my arm.

I remembered trying to pull free. The pain in my stomach. My shoes dragging over the basement steps.

Later, I had found my phone and called Luca.

I had known he could get someone there. He only had to make a call to send guards, a doctor, or an ambulance.

But he didn’t.

I looked at the torn portrait.

I had called because I still believed my brother would come for me.

The room was soon empty, littered with scraps of paper and dust.

Luca stared at the torn painting propped against the hallway wall, then pulled out his phone with an impatient sigh. He checked the messages.

Still no reply.

He typed one last message.

When you’re done sulking, come home.

Then he opened Bianca’s Instagram profile.