Chapter 1 Everything Falls Apart

Everything Falls Apart

POV: Lily

The landlord's email came at 7:43 in the morning and I read it four times before the words actually landed.

Unforeseen circumstances. Deeply sorry for the inconvenience. Full refund within five to seven business days.

Three days before the semester starts, and my apartment is just gone. The man I had been calling every two weeks since July, the one who took my deposit in the middle of summer and confirmed everything twice, was now sending me a paragraph of apologies and a promise that my money would come back before it was even useful to me.

I had a system. I had it all mapped out on a color-coded spreadsheet with move-in timelines and grocery lists built out for the first two weeks and a study schedule already set for the first month. My bags were packed and sitting by the wall. My kitchen boxes were labeled in black marker. I had even bought a rubber door stop so my bedroom door wouldn't bang in the wind when I opened the window at night.

All of it sitting right there, completely useless.

I grabbed my laptop and started searching. Craigslist first, then Zillow, then Apartments.com, then every student housing Facebook group I could find for the Boston area. My fingers were moving too fast and I kept making mistakes and the autocorrect kept changing words and at some point I said something out loud that I immediately regretted because my mom was still downstairs and the walls in this house are thin.

The options were bad and got worse the longer I looked. Shared rooms in crowded houses where six people split one bathroom. Studios with no windows listed as "cozy." A basement unit two miles from campus where the photos looked like whoever lived there had left in a hurry and hadn't looked back. Every place that seemed decent was either too far away, too expensive, or already taken. The listings blurred together after a while and I had to force myself to slow down before I booked something I would regret even more than the current disaster.

Then I found apartment 4B.

It was posted on a university housing board that morning, one I had never noticed before. One bedroom. Close to campus. Available immediately. The photos were clean. The price was higher than my original place, higher than I had planned for, but everything else was worse and some part of my brain that stops arguing when things are bad enough said just take it and stop looking.

I called the number. A man named Marcus picked up on the second ring.

"Is it still available?"

"4B? Yeah. Just listed this morning."

"I'll take it."

A pause. "You haven't seen it."

"I know. Is Friday available for move-in?"

He said yes. I gave him my card number over the phone and he read the deposit amount back to me and I agreed to it without running the numbers because the numbers didn't matter right now. I needed a place by Friday and this was a place by Friday.

I hung up and sat still.

New apartment, a headache sitting right between my eyes, and three days to pull it together.

My phone rang.

Mom.

I thought about letting it go but she would just call again and I'd answer eventually anyway, so I picked up.

"Hey."

"Lily." She said my name that way she has. Slow. Like she's being careful with it. "Your father called me this morning."

The headache got worse.

"Okay," I said.

"He needs money. Says it's urgent."

"It's always urgent with him."

She went quiet. Not the thinking kind of quiet. The kind where she already knows what she's going to say and she's deciding how to say it without starting a whole thing.

"He's your father, Lily."

"I know."

"I'm not asking you to do anything. I just thought you should know he reached out."

"Did you give him anything?"

"No."

"Good. Don't."

She made a sound that wasn't quite a word and wasn't quite a sigh. I was still sitting on the floor and I started picking at the tape on the nearest box. The label was peeling at one corner and I pressed it back down. It didn't stick right but I kept pressing anyway.

We talked for a few more minutes. She asked about classes. I gave her the short version. She told me to eat real food and not just cereal. I said I would, and we both knew I had a box of granola bars planned for the next three nights. She said she loved me. I said it back.

After I hung up I stayed on the floor for a minute.

My dad. Calling my mom. Needing something again. He disappears for months and shows back up the second things get tight for him, and every time he does her voice goes careful like that, like she's still trying to protect me from something I understood when I was twelve. I had stopped waiting for him to be different. I just hadn't figured out how to stop it from landing the same way every single time.

I got up and started moving boxes toward the door.

If I had everything loaded by four I could drive to the new apartment, get the key from Marcus, and have my things inside before dark. The semester started Thursday. Two days. That had to be enough.

Three trips to the car. Taped the last box properly this time. Locked my mom's front door and left, because if I stayed another minute I would start making a list of everything that could go wrong and I would never actually leave.

The drive took thirty-one minutes. I kept glancing at the GPS even though the route wasn't complicated. Old habit.

Marcus texted the door code when I was two blocks out. Unit 4B, second floor, key under the mat until copies were ready.

I parked, grabbed two bags from the trunk, and went up the stairs.

The hallway on the second floor was quiet. 4A had a small wreath on the door. 4C had shoes lined up outside.

I found 4B and reached down for the mat.

Then I heard it.

Thump. Thump. THUMP.

Bass, coming right through the door. Loud guitar underneath it. The kind of volume that stops being music and starts being a statement. Whoever was in there had it cranked all the way up and had clearly decided the rest of the building could deal with it.

And under all of that, a dog. A big one. Barking steadily, the kind of bark that had been going for a while and was not planning to stop.

I straightened up and checked my phone. Opened the deposit email. Read the address again.

4B. Same building.

I stood there with my bags.

Then I knocked.

Nothing changed inside.

I knocked again. Three times. Hard enough that my knuckles stung after.

The music dropped halfway.

The dog did not.

And then footsteps moved toward the door.