Happy Birthday, to Myself

On my eighteenth birthday, burning with a fever of a hundred and six degrees, I lay alone on the freezing concrete floor of my tiny apartment.

On my phone, notifications from the family group chat were lighting up the screen like fireworks.

A five-tier custom cake. Ninety-nine red roses.

My father was holding her, my mother was kissing her forehead, and my brother was raising a glass to toast her. The girl they were celebrating was Molly, the adoptive daughter who had been raised in my place.

I was the biological daughter of the Prescott family, lost for fifteen years.