"Get off my property before I call the sheriff."
My stepfather's voice cut through the sleet like a car alarm. Warren Castellano stood on the porch of the house in Duluth where I'd spent the last eleven years of my life, his face twisted with a contempt I'd never seen him wear in public. The freezing rain ran off the eaves in ropes, soaked through the cardboard boxes he'd already thrown down the steps, and turned the strip of lawn between the driveway and the mailbox into a smear of black mud and paper.
I was thirty-one. I knelt in that mud in a barn coat that was doing nothing against the wind, trying to catch what I could before it went completely to pulp. Waders. A headlamp. Water-testing kits. Banker boxes of survey data — six years of walleye population counts for three different watershed groups, done mostly for free, done because somebody had to do it. A cooler of vials I'd been keeping at exactly forty degrees since Tuesday. All of it going soft and gray on the lawn of a house I no longer had a key to.
My half-sister Priya watched from the dry side of the porch, holding a golf umbrella that matched her raincoat. "Can you hurry it up, Nadia? You're making the whole cul-de-sac look like a yard sale."
Beside her, my mother — Denise, who married Warren four years after my father died and had spent every year since trying to make me feel like a boarder in my own childhood home — pressed a hand to her collarbone like she needed a witness for what this was costing her. "My blood pressure," she said, to no one, to everyone. "I told you this would happen eventually, Warren. She was never going to grow out of it."
I looked at Warren. Water was running straight off my nose. "Can I at least get the cooler loaded right? Those samples are for the DNR contract. If they warm up I lose the whole batch."
"Not my problem," he said. "You want to spend your life wading around in a river counting fish, you can do it from somewhere that isn't my house."
I'd heard some version of that sentence for a decade. Warren ran the wealth management side of a regional bank downtown, and to him a life had value if it came with a title, a 401(k) match, and a parking spot with your name painted on it. I'd left the University of Minnesota at twenty-one, one semester short of a degree I didn't need for the work I actually wanted, to take a field tech job with a fisheries nonprofit. To Warren that was proof I'd thrown my future in the St. Louis River.
"I don't have a daughter who does this," he said. "My daughter is Priya. You're a grown woman playing in creeks and living off my roof like a tenant who forgot to pay rent."
Priya laughed under the umbrella. "Finally taking out the trash."
Something in my chest just — stopped arguing. I quit asking. I grabbed what would still fit in my truck bed, threw a tarp over the cooler and hoped for the best, and got behind the wheel of my '09 Tacoma with rain running off my hair onto the steering column.
Nobody followed me down the driveway. Not Warren. Not Priya. Not the woman who'd spent four years dismantling my place in that house one drawer at a time.
I drove until Duluth turned into a smear behind the wipers. Two hours later I pulled into a Kwik Trip off I-35 outside Hinckley, parked under a flickering sign, and put my head down on the wheel.
Fifty-one dollars in my checking account. A truck bed full of ruined field gear. No apartment, because I'd been saving for one and living at "home" to do it. My phone was dead. I found a cracked charger wedged in the console and prayed it had enough life left to get one call out.
When the screen finally blinked on at two percent, the notifications piled up all at once. Nothing from Warren. Nothing from Priya. One text from a number with a Hawaii area code.
*Ms. Castellano — this is Otis Nakamura, lead counsel for the Estate of Julian Reyes. I've been trying to reach you since yesterday evening. The reading of the will cannot be delayed further. Please call my office immediately.*
Julian. My great-uncle on my father's side — the family's designated black sheep, the marine biologist who'd taken off for the Pacific decades ago and never came back for a single Thanksgiving. I hadn't spoken to him since I was nineteen.
The phone died again before I could dial.
At sunrise I bought a five-dollar charger at a gas station in Sandstone and called the one person who wouldn't ask me what I'd done to deserve any of this. Renata showed up forty minutes later in her mud-caked Subaru, took one look at me, and pulled me into a hug that smelled like coffee and dog. "You're okay now," she said. "Come on."
It was the first time all night I believed anybody.
Renata put me in her shower and told me not to come out until I could feel my fingers again. Under the hot water the cold finally let go of my body, even if the memories didn't.
They came back in order, like she'd filed them.
Priya's law school acceptance party, two years earlier. The house had been full of Warren's colleagues from the bank, the kind of people who wore blazers to a backyard party in July. I'd shown up late, straight off a fourteen-hour shift tagging sturgeon on the river, and when one of Warren's coworkers asked what I did for a living, Warren answered for me. "Nadia does volunteer stuff with the river," he said, smiling at the man like they were sharing a joke. "It's a phase. She never had Priya's drive."
Priya raised her wine glass. "Don't get too close, she smells like a bait shop."
Then there was the sunroom. Six months before Warren threw me out, Denise decided that the little back room where my late father used to keep his desk needed to become her "wellness studio." I'd been storing three years of field journals in there — leather-bound notebooks logging spawning runs, water temps, injury patterns in the fish we'd tagged, prep work for a state conservation grant I was writing on the side. When I got home from a shift, the room was stripped bare. Denise was in the kitchen with a green smoothie, not even looking up from her phone.
"I tossed those old binders," she said. "They were making the room look like a hoarder lived here."
