Chapter 4: Top Floor

I didn't cry on the steps.

I called the police non-emergency line and asked them to send someone.

Then I called Moira.

"She changed the locks," I said. "My stuff's on the sidewalk."

There was a long silence.

"I'm getting my keys," Moira said. "Don't touch anything. Don't let anybody touch anything. I'm bringing the truck and the kid."

"Why the kid?"

"Because it's Friday and I don't have a sitter, Clare. He'll carry lamps."

The officer who came was young and bored until I showed him the note.

Then he wasn't bored.

"You've been paying rent here?"

"Six years. Nine hundred a month, by check. I have the stubs."

"Then they can't just change the locks. In Massachusetts that's an illegal lockout. They need a court."

He called the number on the foundation's website.

He used a voice I'd never heard a cop use on my family before.

Twenty minutes later a property manager in a Patagonia vest pulled up, holding a new key and looking sick.

"Mrs. Albright said you'd moved out," he mumbled.

"Did I look moved out?"

He let me in.

The officer stood in the doorway while I walked through my own apartment.

They'd taken everything I owned and left everything they owned.

The foundation's couch. The foundation's framed print of Verity at a charity walk.

My half of the closet was bare hangers.

"You can stay," the officer said. "She'd need to take you to court to get you out. It'd take months."

I looked at the print of my sister over the couch.

I thought about sleeping under it for months, with my mother holding the key.

"No," I said. "I'm leaving. I want it in your report that I chose to."

He wrote it down.

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