My younger brother said no room for me on the Christmas trip, but when I traveled alone, they panicked.

My brother said, “No room for you on the dream Christmas trip.” So I just texted back two words: “All good.” One week later, when I vanished from their calls and the internet found my story, my family panicked. They weren’t scared for me. They were scared of the world seeing the truth. If you have ever been erased from the perfect family picture, stick around. Their panic did not come from love.

My name is Harper Moore, and for the last seven years I have made a living by predicting how human beings interact with digital interfaces at Aurora Mosaic Creative Lab. My official title is Senior UX Designer. But my actual job is to smooth out the friction in other people’s lives. I anticipate where a user might get frustrated and I build a bridge over that frustration before they even know it is there. I am good at it. I am efficient, invisible, and accommodating. It is a skill set I did not learn in design school. I learned it at the dinner table of my childhood home.

I was sitting at my standing desk, the ergonomic mat cushioning my feet, staring at the high-fidelity prototype for a new mental wellness app we were pitching to a major healthcare provider. The office was quiet, filled only with the hum of expensive servers and the soft clatter of mechanical keyboards. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the Seattle sky was a flat, oppressive gray, threatening snow that likely would not stick. I was adjusting the hex code on a calming blue button when my phone vibrated against the birch veneer of the desk. It was a single short buzz, the kind that usually signals a delivery update or a spam notification. I glanced down. The name on the screen was Dylan.

My younger brother usually only texted me when he needed advice on a gift for our mother or when he wanted me to look over his résumé. We had been planning the family Christmas trip to Silver Ridge for four months. I had already requested the time off. I had already bought a new set of thermal layers. I picked up the phone, expecting a logistical update about departure times or a request to bring that specific brand of artisanal coffee bean Dad liked.

The message was two sentences long.

No room for you on the cabin trip. Maybe next year.

I read it once, then I read it again. The words were so simple, so devoid of emotion that they felt like a syntax error in a line of code.

No room.

This was a cabin my parents had rented in Colorado. A massive A-frame that slept fourteen people, according to the listing Mom had sent around in the group chat back in August. There were four of us in the immediate family, plus Dylan’s wife, Megan. Even with the two dogs, the math did not add up.

I stared at the screen until the backlight dimmed and timed out, leaving me looking at the reflection of my own shocked face in the black glass. My heart did not race. Instead, it seemed to stop entirely, a cold vacuum opening up in the center of my chest. I waited for the follow-up text. I waited for the “Just kidding,” or the “We had to change cabins to a smaller one.”

Nothing came. The three dots that indicate someone is typing never appeared.

My fingers hovered over the keyboard. I wanted to scream. I wanted to type a paragraph outlining the logistics of sleeping bags, of sofas, of the fact that I had spent three grand on plane tickets to Denver that were non-refundable. I wanted to ask why I was the one being cut from the roster less than a week before Christmas. But I knew the script. I knew exactly what would happen if I pushed back. I would be the difficult one. I would be the one ruining the holiday spirit. I would be the drama queen.

So I swallowed the scream. I typed two words.

All good.

I hit send. My hand was trembling so violently that when I reached for my mouse to go back to work, the cursor skittered across the dual monitors, deleting a navigation bar I had spent forty minutes perfecting. I sat there staring at the broken design, breathing in shallow, jagged gasps.

Three minutes later, a notification popped up on my secondary monitor. It was a Facebook alert. Patricia, my mother, had just uploaded a new album. I clicked it. I should not have clicked it, but the masochistic impulse was too strong to resist.

The album was titled “Silver Ridge-bound,” and the cover photo was a masterpiece of curated family joy. They were standing in the driveway of my parents’ house in the suburbs. My father, Ron, was wearing his Santa hat, the one with the bells that he only wore when he was in a truly good mood. My mother was holding the leash of Buster, their golden retriever, who looked manic with excitement. And there, in the center, was Dylan. He had his arm draped possessively around Megan’s shoulders. They were all beaming, their teeth white and straight, their cheeks flushed with the anticipation of a winter wonderland.

The caption read, “Our perfect Christmas crew. The car is packed and we are ready for the mountains. Blessed to have the family together.”

“Family together.” The words tasted like ash in my mouth.

I zoomed in on the photo, my eyes trained to catch pixel misalignments and spacing errors. I began to scan the image for data. I looked at the trunk of the SUV, which was popped open behind them. I saw the skis. I saw the cooler. And then I saw the detail that made my blood run cold.

Tucked behind Megan’s legs, partially obscured by the bumper but unmistakably visible, was the large hard-shell Samsonite suitcase. The blue one. We used to call it “the beast” because it was massive. It was the spare suitcase my parents kept in the attic. It was packed. It was bulging at the seams. That suitcase was large enough to hold a week of clothes for a grown adult. It was large enough to hold my clothes.

If there was no room, why were they bringing the spare luggage? If the car was too full for me, how did they fit a thirty-inch hard-shell case that was clearly not empty? It sat there in the corner of the frame like a silent mocking punchline.

There was room for an extra fifty pounds of gear. There was room for the dog’s oversized bed, which I could see wedged on top. There was room for everything and everyone except me.

The comments were already rolling in. I watched them appear in real time.

“Beautiful family. Have a safe drive,” wrote Aunt Linda.

“So jealous. Silver Ridge is a dream. Wish I was there,” commented Cousin Sarah.

These were the same people who had forgotten to text me on my birthday for the last four years. To them, the picture was complete. There was no missing piece.

Then I saw Dylan’s reply to Sarah.

“Wish some people could make time to join us. But you know how it is—priorities.”

The air left my lungs. He was not just excluding me. He was rewriting the narrative in real time. He was spinning it. He was making it look like I was the one who had bailed. Like I was the busy, city-dwelling career woman who considered herself too important to descend from her high-rise apartment for a family gathering. He had told me there was no room, and ten minutes later he was telling the world I had simply chosen not to come.

I felt a physical nausea rise in my throat.

I looked around the office. My colleague Jason was wearing headphones, bobbing his head to music, completely oblivious that my entire world was collapsing in a Facebook comment section.

I scrolled past the comments and suddenly the office faded away.

I was ten years old again.

It was Christmas Eve. My parents had been invited to a couples-only gala at the country club. It was a prestigious event, very important for my father’s networking. They took Dylan because he was the baby, only six years old, crying that he could not sleep without Mom. They put him in a tuxedo that matched Dad’s. They left me with Mrs. Gable next door.

“The hotel suite only has one pullout couch, Harper,” my mother had said, adjusting her pearl earrings. “And you are big enough to be independent. Mrs. Gable has cable TV.”

I spent that Christmas Eve watching Mrs. Gable knit beige socks while my family slept in a four-star hotel and ordered room service.

The memory shifted. I was fourteen. My family went to Hawaii for the holidays. They told me the plane tickets were just too expensive that year, that the economy was tight, so they sent me to stay with my best friend’s family for a week. I tried to be grateful. I tried to have fun. But when they came back, tan and smiling, I found the ticket stubs in the trash. Dylan had flown first class.

“Project approved.”

A sharp ping from Slack pulled me back to the present, snapping the thread of memory. My project manager had tagged me in the main channel.

“Harper, the prototype is approved. Client loves the flow. Amazing work on the user journey. This is going to be huge.”

It was a major win. This project was the biggest of the year. It was going to secure my bonus. It was going to look incredible on my portfolio. I stared at the message.

“Amazing work.”

I was competent. I was valued. I was essential to this company. I waited for a second, staring at my phone, half expecting a text from my dad or mom. Maybe a generic “Safe travels,” or even a belated, “Sorry you can’t make it. We’ll miss you.”

Nothing came. Just an automated email from the company HR system reminding me to submit my time-off request for the holidays before the end of the day.

I closed my laptop. I could not look at the wellness app anymore. I could not design a path to happiness for a user persona when I felt like I was drowning on dry land.

I left the office early. The sky over Seattle had finally made good on its threat, and wet, heavy snow was beginning to stick to the pavement. By the time I unlocked the door to my apartment in Capitol Hill, the city was turning white.

My apartment was quiet. It was a nice place, a one-bedroom with exposed brick and a view of the Space Needle if you craned your neck just right. It was clean, curated, and completely empty. I did not have a tree up. I had been waiting to go to Silver Ridge to celebrate. I had gifts wrapped and sitting on the dining table, waiting to be packed into a suitcase that I would now never use—a cashmere scarf for Mom, a high-end rangefinder for Dad’s golf game, a vintage vinyl record for Dylan.

I sat on my couch, still in my heavy wool coat, and watched the streetlights flicker on below. The snow swirled in the cones of amber light, beautiful and lonely.

My phone buzzed again. It was my mother.

“Don’t make drama about the trip this time. We just couldn’t add another bed. Enjoy your quiet time.”

“Don’t make drama.”

The phrase echoed in the empty room. I was not screaming. I was not calling them. I was not posting angry rants on social media. I was sitting alone in the dark, wearing my coat inside my own house. And yet, I was already being preemptively accused of ruining things.

I opened the notes app on my phone. My hands were steady now. Cold, but steady. I started a new list. I did not title it. I just started typing.

Age 10: Mrs. Gable’s house.
Age 14: Hawaii exclusion.
Age 18: Dylan’s birthday in Vegas. I was told the hotel was 21-plus.
College graduation dinner: They forgot to reserve a seat for me and I had to pull up a folding chair from the waiter station.
My 25th birthday: They combined it with Dylan’s promotion party and the cake said, “Congrats, Dylan.”

The list grew longer. The white light of the screen illuminated the tears I had not realized were falling. They were hot and angry, tracking through the foundation I had applied that morning to look professional.

Why was I always the one trying to fold myself smaller to fit into the cracks of their lives? Why was I always the variable that could be removed to make the equation perfect?

I was the extra suitcase. I was the spare tire. I was the thing you brought along only if there was plenty of space—but the first thing you jettisoned when the road got steep.

I looked up at the wall calendar hanging in my kitchen. The week of December 25th was marked with a bright red Sharpie: “Family Trip – Silver Ridge.” It looked like a mockery now. The red ink seemed to bleed into the white square. The days were blank and expansive. I had ten days of vacation time approved. I had a bonus check for $20,000 clearing in my account next week. I had a suitcase that I had not even packed yet.

A thought sparked in my mind. It was very quiet, very small, but it burned with the intensity of a magnesium flare.

They wanted a perfect Christmas without me. They wanted me to be the invisible daughter who stayed quiet in her apartment, accepted the scraps of affection, and liked their photos on Facebook to keep up appearances.

What if I gave them exactly what they wanted?

What if this year I did not just stay home? What if I disappeared from their plans completely? Not just passive-aggressive silence. I mean vanishing, literally. No tracking, no updates, no safety net for them to fall back on when they needed a scapegoat.

I looked at the “All good” text I had sent Dylan. It was a lie. It was not all good. But as I looked at the snow falling harder outside, burying the city in silence, I realized something.

It was about to be.

The snow was falling harder now, dusting the ledge of my window in Capitol Hill. But inside my head, the temperature was sweltering. It was the humid, sticky heat of the Caribbean. I was sixteen years old again, standing in our living room, watching my father zip up his suitcase.

That was the year of the Grand Christmas Cruise. My parents had talked about it for months. They had brochures fanned out on the coffee table, glossy images of turquoise water and midnight buffets. I had memorized the itinerary. I had even looked up the shore excursions, fantasizing about snorkeling in Cozumel.

Two weeks before departure, my mother sat me down. She had that specific look on her face, a tight apologetic grimace that did not reach her eyes. It was the look she wore when she was about to deliver bad news that was actually a relief to her.

She told me there had been a mix-up with the booking agent. The family suite only had accommodation for three people. They had tried, she insisted, wringing her hands theatrically, to get an adjoining room, but the ship was at capacity. Because I was older—sixteen and responsible—surely I would understand that Dylan, who was barely twelve, could not be left behind.

So I stayed in Seattle. I spent that Christmas heating up frozen lasagna and watching reruns of sitcoms. Ten days later, a postcard arrived in the mail. It was a generic photo of the ship docked in Jamaica. On the back, in my mother’s looping, decorative handwriting, it said, “Having a wonderful time. The buffet is endless. Wish you were here.”

I remember holding that card, feeling the glossy paper against my thumb.

“Wish you were here.”

It felt like a joke. It felt like they were laughing at me from 3,000 miles away. If they had wished I was there, they would have booked a room with a pullout couch. They would have checked the reservation. They would have stayed home.

That was the first time I realized that my absence was not an accident. It was a feature of their happiness.

Two years later, the pattern solidified into concrete. I was eighteen. Dylan was turning sixteen for his birthday, which fell right near the holidays. My parents rented a penthouse suite in Las Vegas. I was excited. I had never been to Vegas. I bought a sparkly dress from the clearance rack at the mall three days before the trip.

My father cleared his throat at the dinner table. He told me that upon reflection, Las Vegas was not an appropriate environment for a young woman who was “almost legal, but not quite.” He said it would be frustrating for me to not be able to enter the casinos or the clubs. He said they were doing me a favor by not dragging me along to a place where I would be bored.

I stayed home. I saw the photos later. They went to the M&M’s store. They went to the massive arcade. They went to family-friendly shows. There was nothing in that trip I could not have done. The only thing that was inappropriate for the trip was me.

The memories came in waves, overlapping with the cold silence of my apartment. The sharpest blade, the one that still woke me up at night sometimes, was my college graduation.

I graduated summa cum laude with a degree in interaction design. It was a big ceremony in the university stadium. I had sent my parents the date six months in advance. I had reminded them weekly. When I walked across the stage to accept my diploma, I scanned the crowd. I knew exactly where their seats were supposed to be. I had bought the tickets myself. I looked for my father’s bald spot, for my mother’s expertly highlighted blonde hair.

I saw three empty gray folding chairs.

I accepted my diploma, shook the dean’s hand, and walked off stage with a smile plastered on my face that felt like it was made of cracking plaster.

Later, in the parking lot, while other families were hugging and popping confetti cannons, I checked Facebook. There was a check-in for my mother:

“Napa Valley Vineyards,” the caption read. “Celebrating our boy. Dylan just landed a summer internship at a tech startup. So proud of his hustle. Wine tasting to celebrate the future.”

They had skipped my actual college graduation to celebrate my brother getting a temporary unpaid summer job.

I stood there in my heavy black gown, the tassel of my cap blowing in the wind, and I felt like I was dissolving. I was transparent. I did not matter.

And then I heard the rumble of an engine. A beat-up, rusted red pickup truck pulled up to the curb, coughing smoke. The window rolled down and there was Aunt Jo.

Josephine is my father’s older sister. She is everything he is not. Where he is polished, she is rough around the edges. Where he cares about appearances, she cares about substance. She was wearing a flannel shirt covered in sawdust and a Mariners baseball cap. She hopped out of the truck, marched over to me, and wrapped me in a hug that smelled like engine grease and vanilla.

“I told Ron he was an idiot,” she said into my hair. “But I’m glad he’s an idiot because it means I get you all to myself.”

She had driven five hours from Spokane. In the passenger seat was Uncle Mark, looking sleepy but smiling. And in the back was little Maya, who was only four years old at the time. They had brought a homemade apple pie that was still warm, wrapped in tin foil, and a bouquet of sunflowers they had bought from a roadside stand.

That night, we did not go to a fancy dinner. We went to their motel room, ordered three large pizzas, and sat on the beds eating straight from the box. That was the beginning of my other life, my real life.

Over the years, Jo, Mark, and Maya became my shelter. When I got my first big promotion and my parents ignored the text, Mark called me to ask specifically about the coding languages I was using, even though he did not understand a word of it. When I had my heart broken by a guy I thought was “the one,” Jo drove over and let me cry on her shoulder for four hours while she brushed my hair. Sundays became our ritual. I would drive over to their small, cluttered house. We would eat cold pizza or whatever experimental casserole Jo had burned that week. We would watch black-and-white movies because Mark loved them. Maya, who was growing up too fast, would make me play shop. I had to be the difficult customer who returned everything, and she would practice her customer service voice.

I remembered Christmas when I was twenty-four. I had not been invited home. My mother had called it “an oversight with the email invites,” but by the time she realized, the guest room was already promised to Megan’s parents. I spent that Christmas morning at Jo’s kitchen table. I was drinking bad coffee out of a chipped mug. Maya, then seven, was standing behind me.

“Hold still, Harper,” she had commanded. She was drawing a crown on a piece of yellow construction paper. She taped it together, placed it on my head, and declared me the queen of the kitchen.

At that exact moment, my phone had pinged. It was an Instagram notification. My mother had posted a photo of the family—Mom, Dad, Dylan, and Megan—wearing matching red and green pajamas, holding mugs of cocoa.

Caption: “Family tradition. Nothing matters more than us.”

I looked at the photo. Then I looked at the lopsided paper crown reflecting in the window.

“You’re better off,” Mark had said quietly, watching me stare at the phone.

“Am I?” I had asked. “Why am I the only one who has to be better off? Why can’t I just be included?”

I remembered the conversations I had tried to have with my mother and Dylan over the years. Every time I tried to express how much their exclusion hurt, they twisted it back on me.

“You always make everything so dramatic, Harper,” my mother would say, sighing as if my feelings were a heavy chore she had to complete. “We just forgot. It’s not a conspiracy. You love playing the victim.”

Dylan would sneer, “You want us to feel bad because you live in the city and have a different life. Get over yourself.”

Those phrases—“too dramatic,” “victim,” “too sensitive”—played in my head like a broken record. They were the soundtrack to my twenties. They made me question my own reality.

Was I crazy? Was I demanding too much? Was it unreasonable to expect my parents to want to spend a holiday with me?

But Jo never let that soundtrack play for long.

“You’re not asking for too much, kid,” she told me once while we were weeding her garden. “You’re asking for a seat at a table that should have your name carved into it. The fact that they keep sanding it off is their sin, not yours.”

My job at Aurora Mosaic Creative Lab was supposed to be my escape. I made good money. I worked with Fortune 500 clients. I was respected. I had control. But every holiday season was a humiliating test of my resilience. While my colleagues talked about flying home to Ohio or driving down to Oregon to be with their parents, I was the one volunteering for the on-call shifts. I was the one monitoring the Slack channels on Christmas Eve. I told everyone I preferred the quiet, that I was a workaholic. It was a lie. I worked because if I stopped working, I would have to sit in the silence and acknowledge that nobody was waiting for me.

I looked around my apartment now. The instant noodles on the counter had gone cold and soggy. The broth had formed a weird film on top. I picked up my phone and dialed Jo on FaceTime.

The connection sputtered for a second and then the screen filled with chaos.

“Harper!” Maya screamed. She was ten now, missing a front tooth and wearing a sweater that looked like it was made of tinsel.

“Hi, Bug,” I said, forcing a smile.

“Look at the tree!” She spun the phone around dizzily. The tree was a disaster of mismatched ornaments, popcorn strings, and flashing multicolored lights. It was hideous. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

“It looks amazing,” I said.

Jo’s face appeared in the frame. She looked tired. Her hair was graying, pulled back in a messy bun.

“Don’t lie to the child, Harper, it looks like a clown exploded in the living room,” Jo grumbled. But her eyes were warm. “And this snow—if Mark doesn’t shovel the driveway soon, we’re going to be eating canned beans until Easter.” She squinted at the screen, bringing the phone closer to her face. “You look terrible. What’s wrong? Did you not get enough sleep? You’ve got those dark circles again.”

I took a deep breath. I had not planned to tell her yet. I wanted to process it myself. But seeing her face—the only face that had ever looked at me with unconditional love—broke the dam.

“Dylan texted me,” I said. My voice sounded hollow in the empty apartment.

Jo stopped moving.

“He said there’s no room for me on the cabin trip. He said maybe next year.”

The silence on the other end of the line was heavy. Maya had run off to chase the cat, so it was just Jo staring at me through the pixels. I saw her jaw tighten. I saw the flash of anger that she usually reserved for local politics or bad drivers. She did not say, “I told you so.” She did not say, “They’re jerks.” She did not offer me a platitude.

She looked down at her hands for a long moment, then looked back up at me, her gaze piercing through the screen.

“Harper,” she said, her voice low and steady. “They’ve been telling you there’s no room for twenty years. They’re never going to make room. You keep waiting for them to pull up a chair, but they’re never going to do it.”

I felt a tear slide down my cheek.

“I know.”

“So,” Jo continued, leaning in. “If they don’t have a seat for you, why don’t you book your own seat? A better one.”

I stared at her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’ve got the money now. You’ve got the time. Why are you sitting in that apartment waiting for them to give you scraps? Go somewhere. Go somewhere they can’t afford. Go somewhere they’d hate because they aren’t invited. Book your own seat.”

“Book my own seat,” I whispered.

“Exactly,” Jo said. “Stop being the person who was left behind. Be the person who went ahead.”

She had to go—then Mark dropped something loud in the kitchen—but her words stayed with me. They hung in the air of my apartment, vibrating.

Stop being the person who was left behind.

I looked at the soggy noodles. I looked at the dark window. For my entire life, I had accepted the role they assigned me—the extra, the burden, the afterthought. I had defined myself by their rejection. I had let their “no room” be the walls of my prison.

But Jo was right. I had the money. I had the bonus coming. I was a senior UX designer who solved complex problems for a living. Why couldn’t I solve this one?

The idea started as a small, cold point of light in my chest. It was frightening. It went against every instinct I had to be good, to be quiet, to wait for permission. But as I sat there listening to the wind howl outside, the idea began to grow. It accumulated weight like the snow piling up on the windowsill. It was no longer just a defensive thought. It was becoming an offensive strategy.

They said there was no room. Fine. I would find a room so magnificent, so distant, and so completely mine that their crowded little cabin would feel like a cage.

The first snowflake of the plan had landed. The storm was coming.

The email arrived at ten in the morning on a Tuesday, exactly one week before Christmas. I was sitting in the open-plan office of Aurora Mosaic, surrounded by the low hum of productivity and the smell of high-end espresso. My noise-cancelling headphones were on, playing a loop of ambient rain sounds to drown out the festive chatter of my colleagues. They were all discussing flight delays and turkey recipes. I was trying to focus on a wireframe for a banking app, but my mind kept drifting back to the empty calendar on my wall at home.

Then a notification banner slid across the top of my screen.

Subject: Year-end performance bonus & stock grant allocation.

I clicked it, expecting the usual corporate token of appreciation—maybe a few thousand, maybe a gift card to a steakhouse. I had to blink twice to make sure I was reading the numbers correctly.

“Dear Harper,” the email began. “In recognition of your outstanding leadership on the Helix Health Project and your consistent delivery of high-value UX solutions, we are pleased to award you a year-end performance bonus of $20,000.”

Twenty thousand dollars.

I sat back in my ergonomic chair, the breath leaving my lungs in a slow hiss. Below the bonus figure was another paragraph detailing a significant stock grant that would vest over the next three years. But my eyes were glued to that first number. $20,000.

I did the math instantly. It was a reflex.

When I was fourteen, the plane ticket to Hawaii that was “too expensive” had cost $450. When I was sixteen, the extra bed on the cruise ship would have cost $600. When I was eighteen, the difference between a standard room and the suite in Vegas was $300 a night. For my entire life, my worth had been calculated in nickels and dimes. I had been told over and over that the family budget simply could not stretch to accommodate me. I was the line item that always put them in the red. I was the luxury they could not afford.

And now, sitting in my office with a cooling cup of coffee, I was staring at a sum of money that could have paid for every single one of those trips ten times over. A dark, dry laugh bubbled up in my throat. It was not a happy sound. It was the sound of a realization hitting bone.

They had never been too poor to take me. They were just unwilling. And now, ironically, I was likely the richest person in the family. Dylan was drowning in student loans he pretended did not exist, and my parents were leveraged to the hilt to maintain their country club appearance. I could buy the entire cabin they were renting in Silver Ridge. I could buy the car they were driving there.

“Harper?”

I looked up. It was Sarah, the junior designer at the desk across from me. She was holding a reindeer mug.

“You okay? You look like you just saw a ghost.”

“No,” I said, a strange calmness settling over me. “I just saw a deposit.”

Sarah laughed, thinking I was joking, and went back to talking about her flight to Ohio.

“I’m dreading the airport,” she sighed. “But, you know, got to get home for the holidays. Are you doing anything? I know you said your family trip was off.”

“Yeah,” I said. “The trip is off.”

“That sucks. So—staycation? Netflix and takeout?”

I looked at the screen again. $20,000.

“No,” I said. The word came out before I had even formed the plan. “No, I’m going away.”

“Oh. Where?”

“Somewhere cold,” I said. “Somewhere quiet.”

I turned back to my computer. I did not open Expedia or Kayak. Those felt too frantic, too full of delays and crowded terminals. I opened a browser tab and typed: luxury train travel winter.

I did not want to fly. I wanted to disappear into the landscape. I wanted to see the world move past me while I stayed still.

The search results gave me the Empire Builder, a train route that ran from Seattle all the way to Chicago, cutting through the heart of the American North. I scrolled through the stops—Whitefish, Glacier National Park—and then I saw a smaller, less popular stop near the border of Montana and Idaho, a place called Frost Peak Station.

It sounded like a place where cell service went to die. It was perfect.

I opened a map of the area around the station. There were a few generic motels, and then, tucked away near the edge of a national forest reserve, was a link for something called The Ice Lantern Inn. I clicked the link.

The website was elegant, dark, and minimalist.

“The Ice Lantern Inn,” the text read. “For those who seek silence.”

I clicked on the rooms tab. There was one suite left for the Christmas week: the Solstice Loft. The photos showed a room with high-vaulted timber ceilings, a private stone fireplace, a king-sized bed piled with faux fur throws, and a copper soaking tub situated right in front of a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking a dense, snow-covered pine forest.

It cost $800 a night.

Two weeks ago, I would have hyperventilated at that price. I would have calculated how many weeks of groceries that represented. I looked at the bonus email again.

I clicked “Book now.”

I filled in my information. My fingers were flying across the keyboard, moving faster than my brain could process the rebellion I was committing. I added the Starlight snowshoe tour. I added the private chef’s tasting menu. I added the in-room massage package. I hit the final confirmation button.

Reservation confirmed.
Welcome to The Ice Lantern, Harper.

My heart was hammering against my ribs, a frantic, bird-like rhythm. It felt like I was doing something illegal. I was not sitting by the phone waiting for an invite. I was not begging for a fold-out couch. I was buying the castle.

I sat there for a moment, breathing hard. The adrenaline was sharp and metallic in my mouth. I picked up my phone. My thumb hovered over the Instagram icon. The instinct to post a screenshot of the booking was strong. I wanted to caption it “No room, no problem.” I wanted them to see it. I wanted them to know.

But then I stopped.

If I posted it, I was still playing their game. I was still seeking a reaction. I was still asking them to look at me.

Real power, I realized, was not in making them jealous. Real power was in making them irrelevant.

I closed Instagram. I opened my email client and composed a single new message to:

To: Josephine Morgan
Subject: Safe

Hey, Aunt Jo. I’m going away for a few days. Heading to Montana on the train. I need to clear my head. If anything happens, you’re the only one who knows where I am. I’ll text you when I get there.
Love,
Harper

Sent.

I had barely put the phone down when it buzzed. It was the family group chat, the one named “Morgan Family Christmas Joy.” I stared at the notification. Part of me wanted to ignore it. Part of me needed to see the contrast.

I opened it.

Dylan had sent a photo. They were in the living room of my parents’ house. Mom, Dad, Dylan, and Megan. They were all wearing brand new matching white and silver ski jackets. They looked expensive. They looked happy. They looked complete.

The caption read, “Gear check—ready to hit the slopes. Some of us really know how to prioritize family. Can’t wait for Silver Ridge.”

“Some of us.”

The insult was so thinly veiled it was practically transparent. He was taking a dig at me. He was implying that I wasn’t there because I didn’t care enough. Because I didn’t have my priorities straight.

I looked at the photo. I looked at my mother’s smile, the way she leaned into Dylan. She looked relieved. Without me there, she didn’t have to