Chapter 1: The Weight of the Wood
I stood on the immaculately swept concrete of my parents’ front porch, the freezing autumn wind biting through my thin cardigan. Behind me huddled my three children, their breath pluming in the frigid air. At my feet sat a heavy, black polyethylene garbage bag containing the absolute bare minimum of our existence—pajamas, a few stuffed animals, toothbrushes. I raised my knuckles and knocked on that familiar oak door, the same brass knocker I had utilized a thousand times before.
This was my mother’s sanctuary. My father’s domain. And as the heavy door swung open, revealing the warm, golden light of the foyer, they looked at me, looked at the trash bag, and proceeded to close it right in my face.
My brother offered a derisive chuckle from the staircase. My sister materialized to deliver a condescending lecture on marital endurance. And as I stood there, absorbing the shockwave of their betrayal, the chill seeping through the soles of my cheap shoes, I made myself a single, unbreakable vow. Just three words, whispered into the void of that suburban night:
Watch what happens.
This is the chronicle of exactly what happened.
My name is Coralie. Eighteen months prior to standing on that porch like a beggar, I possessed what polite society would classify as a highly respectable life. It wasn’t a cinematic existence. It wasn’t the curated, filter-heavy perfection you see on social media that elicits a barrage of envious comments. But it was structurally sound. It was stable.
I resided in a suburban split-level with a dishwasher that didn’t rattle, drove a silver minivan with a fractured left taillight I perpetually swore I’d replace, and was raising three humans who were aging at such a terrifying velocity that blinking felt like skipping chapters in a book.
Sarin, my eldest at nine, was fiercely analytical. She was the anomaly who meticulously read the instruction manual before tearing the shrink-wrap off a board game. Calla, six, was a tempest of kinetic energy, convinced that if she flapped her arms with enough conviction, gravity would eventually surrender. And Arlo, my four-year-old, was still compact enough to mold against my chest when he slept, still young enough to harbor the delusion that his mother possessed the magic to fix any broken thing in the universe.
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