The knock comes without warning. I am still in my pajamas, still holding a coffee I have not drunk, still replaying last night's conversation with Ghost when I open the door and find my parents standing in the hallway.
My father in his pressed charcoal suit. My mother in pearls and a cashmere cardigan. Both wearing the tight smiles that have preceded every bad moment of my childhood.
My stomach drops through the floor.
"Surprise visit," my mother says, stepping inside without being invited. Her heels click against my hardwood. "We heard about you and Tristan. His mother called us. Very concerned."
My blood goes cold.
Of course she did. Of course the breakup traveled through their social network before I could control the narrative.
"We thought we'd see how our daughter is doing," my father adds, his eyes already scanning the apartment. Cataloging. Judging. "Make sure she hasn't done anything... reckless."
I do not move from the doorway. "You could have called."
"And miss the chance to see how you really live?" My father brushes past me, his eyes already scanning the apartment. Cataloging. Judging. "Close the door, Eleanor. You're letting the heat out."
Eleanor. Not Nora. Never Nora when they are displeased.
I close the door and they move through my space with the practiced efficiency of inspectors. My mother runs a finger along the bookshelf and examines the dust. My father opens the refrigerator and frowns at its contents.
They touch my things, rearrange my pillows, peer into corners I forgot existed. I stand in the center of my own living room and feel myself shrinking with every second.
"The place is smaller than I expected," my mother says. "For what we're paying."
"It's close to campus."
"Proximity is not an excuse for squalor."
When Father has drifted toward my desk, my heart seizes. The grade report.
I printed it last week to review, and I forgot — I forgot to hide it, forgot to shred it, forgot that my parents have a sixth sense for finding exactly what I do not want them to see.
He picks up the paper and his face darkens immediately.
"B minus in Economics." His voice is flat. Dangerous. "C plus in Statistics."
"I can explain…"
"You told us you were excelling." He turns to face me, and I am eight years old again, standing in the kitchen doorway while his shadow grows longer. "You told us everything was fine."
"I am doing fine." My voice comes out small. Wrong.
The voice of a girl who learned long ago that small and wrong was safer than loud and right.
"This is not fine." He steps toward me. "This is mediocre. This is embarrassing. Do you have any idea what your grandfather would say? What the board would think if they knew the Ashford heir couldn't manage a simple statistics course?"
"It's just one semester."
"It's a pattern." His jaw tightens. "You've been slipping since fall. Don't think I haven't noticed. Are you even going to your classes? Or are you too busy playing games to bother?"
My mother has drifted toward the bedroom. I track her movement with rising dread, my pulse pounding in my ears.
She stops in the doorway and reaches for something on my nightstand. "What is this?"
She holds up my VR headset. The one that contains the only world where I have ever felt real and the only place where Ghost exists.
"It's just a game," I say. Too fast. Too desperate.
"A game."
My father crosses the room in three strides and takes the headset from my mother. He turns it over in his hands, examining it the way he examines everything — looking for weakness, for failure, for proof that I am not what he raised me to be.
"You're failing your classes because you're playing games?"
"I'm not failing."
"You're wasting the opportunities we gave you." His voice rises. The familiar crescendo.
The one that always came before the bad nights, before the closed doors and the sounds my mother pretended not to hear.
"The tuition we pay. The future we built for you. And you're throwing it all away for this?"
He shakes the headset and my heart lurches. "Dad, please..!"
"This is why you're distracted. This is why you can't focus. This is why you're becoming everything I told you not to be."
"It's not…"
"Maybe if you spent more time studying and behaving the way you should," my mother cuts in, her voice sharp and thin, "instead of playing games like a child, Tristan wouldn't have left you."
The words slice through me.
They do not know. They do not know he was the one who cheated, the one who called me frigid and broken. The one who climbed into bed with someone else because I would not open my legs fast enough.
They heard his mother's version — poor Tristan, patient Tristan, finally giving up on the cold Ashford girl who could not love him properly.
And they believe it. Of course they believe it.
Because I am always the problem. I have always been the problem.
"Don't." My father's voice cuts through the air. "Don't make excuses. Don't lie to me. I raised you better than this."
He did not raise me. He trained me. Shaped me. Broke me into pieces and glued me back together in a form he found acceptable. And now he is holding the one thing I built for myself, the one escape I had from his voice in my head, and I cannot breathe.
"Please…" I whisper. "Please don't."
He drops the headset on the floor before stepping on it.
The crack of plastic and glass is the loudest sound I have ever heard. It echoes through my apartment, through my chest, through every part of me that learned to survive by staying silent.
He grinds his heel into the visor, and I hear the components crunch, the circuitry snap, the world I built shattering into a thousand irreparable pieces.
I stand frozen while my father destroys the only escape I ever had.
My mother watches from the doorway with that familiar silence — complicit, cowardly, already gone somewhere inside herself.
"Focus on what matters," my father says, stepping back. His voice is calm again. The storm passed. "We'll be checking your grades monthly. I expect improvement, Eleanor."
They walk to the door together and Mother pauses at the threshold. "We only want what's best for you," she says. "You know that."
When the door finally closes behind them, I sink to the floor.
The headset lies in pieces around me. Shattered plastic. Cracked glass. Wires spilling out. I pick up a fragment of the visor and stare at my reflection — fractured, multiplied, a dozen broken versions of myself staring back.
I do not think about my grades. I do not think about my parents.
I think about Ghost.
The way he waited for me by the stone bridge every night. The lights that bloomed when he kissed me.
Rules are optional, he said.
You don't have to be okay, he said.
I'm not going anywhere, he said.
He said and said and said all the things no one else had ever said to me, and I believed him. I believed every word.
And now I don't know if I will ever be able to see him again.
He will log in tonight, and I will not be there. He will wait by the stone bridge, and I will not come. He will send messages I cannot receive, and eventually he will stop waiting.
He will think I left him. He will think I chose to disappear without a word. He will never know that my father's heel destroyed the only bridge between us. He will never know that I would have stayed forever if I could.
I never said goodbye.
The tears come then, silent and endless. My chest heaves as I clutch the fragment of visor until the edges cut into my palm, and I do not care.
