My name is Clara Anne Merritt.
I am 28 years old.
On November 26th, 2024, my mother called me at 6:42 in the evening and told me to come home for Thanksgiving.
Her voice was warm in that particular way it got when she needed something, soft around the edges, careful, like she was handling something fragile.
“The whole family,” she said. “All of us together. It’s been too long, sweetheart.”
I drove 41 miles from my apartment in Murfreesboro to my parents’ house in Franklin, Tennessee.
The house is worth $1.8 million according to Zillow. I checked once on a Tuesday night when I couldn’t sleep and found myself wondering what it would feel like to be considered part of what that house represented.
I took I-24 west and then 96 north, windows down even though it was 43 degrees, because I needed the cold air to settle the hope that was already building in my chest.
Hope is a dangerous thing when your family has spent years giving you reasons to stop feeling it.
I pulled into the driveway at 8:17 p.m.
One car was there, a 2002 Buick LeSabre, champagne-colored, with a dent on the rear bumper from a parking lot in 2019 that my grandmother had never gotten fixed because she said it gave the car character.
My parents’ Volvo was gone.
My brother’s Audi was gone.
I sat in my car for a moment with the engine running and the heat finally coming through the vents, and I counted my breaths.
Then I went inside.
The front door was unlocked.
The foyer smelled like cinnamon and old books and the specific dusty warmth of a house that has been lived in for decades.
The kitchen light was on.
I walked through to the living room and found my grandmother sitting at the dining table in her house robe and slippers, working a crossword puzzle in ink.
