My father’s house, the home I’d grown up in, was in desperate need of a repaint. Once, it had been yellow and bright, a safe haven and a place of joy for me when I’d been growing up. The porch swing out front had moved in the breeze, creaking beside my bedroom window as I tried to fall asleep. But now it was broken, sagging, as if my father had come home from the casino one too many times, drunk off his ass, and slumped into it.

Nothing was sacred.

“Luna, hey.” Dad was still at the door, gazing out after me as I left in a huff.

I whipped my head around, allowing my red hair to scatter over my shoulders. My green eyes were aflame.

“What is it, Pop?”

“I’m going to be all right,” he said, creaking the door open. He leaned heavily against the frame, his face looking tired and gray after the stress of the previous few years. “You know I always pull out of this kind of thing.”

Tears sprung up in my eyes, making me blink rapidly to hold them back. I had to be the strong one. I’d had to be for years.

“They’re going to come after you if you don’t repay that money. A loan shark of all people? Jesus. You said it yourself: violent consequences. And they don’t care that you’re sick, Dad. They don’t care that you’re my only family, that you’re a good person. They only know your gambling debt. They only know that you owe them twenty thousand—”

Dad stuck his hand into the air, halting my words, the motion firm. “Keep it down, honey,” he whispered, his voice raspy. “I don’t want all of Iowa City to know about this.”

“Well, they’ll know if you end up dead,” I countered, then immediately regretted it. I brought my arms over my chest, crossing them tightly, and gazed into his faded green eyes. “I’m just so worried about you.”

He beckoned me toward him. Giving a final sigh, I crept toward him and accepted his weak hug, knowing his heart problems prevented any real strength. He hadn’t been able to laugh or play in a gruff and real way since his diagnosis years before. He needed surgery, but the bills for the medication were already piling up, leaving us at a loss.

Of course, he’d compounded them with his gambling addiction.

“You look tired, Daddy,” I said, breaking the hug early and gazing down at my shoes. They were scuffed, tinged with ketchup from the long days at the diner. I couldn’t afford to buy new ones, let alone dig us out of this kind of debt. “You should get some sleep. We’ll figure this out together.”

But as I said it, I sensed how doomed we truly were.

In the silence that fell between us, my father retraced his steps, entering the dark haze of the house once more, and locking the door behind him. I was left standing slumped and broken, gazing at the busted front porch and wondering how—at 25 years old—my life already seemed dilapidated and shadowed, without hope.

Slipping into my car, I collapsed upon my steering wheel, allowing myself to cry real tears. They coiled down my cheeks, dipping into my mouth and coating my lips with salt. A twenty-thousand-dollar loan from some shady local loan shark. Jesus Christ, Dad.

Of course, he’d thought he was taking the problem on himself. He’d thought he was helping me, ‘keeping me out of things’ as he’d put it. He’d never allowed me to go to the casino with him, knowing it was his most shameful activity—the one that was putting us both under, more and more, every time he tossed down chips.

I hadn’t caught onto the gambling addiction until I was maybe 17. It was pretty easy to see when you were the only one who couldn’t afford lunch at school and your pop was out till dawn. But I’d wanted to believe in him. The heart problems had only crept to the surface when I’d stopped by the house a few years ago and answered the phone call from the cardiologist, who’d told me, point-blank, that I had better demand some answers from my father. He was keeping the truth about his predicament from me. It would only add to the stress on his busted-out heart.

A literal broken heart. A gambling addiction. And now, a loan shark, after my dad’s head.

I reached forward and turned the key in the ignition before driving the car too fast down the neighborhood street. Under the cover of darkness, many of the houses I’d been accustomed to my entire life looked shaded, strange, like they belonged on a street in an old horror movie. They were no longer guarded with the titles of my childhood: “the one that passed out good Halloween candy” or “the one that always brought over casseroles when they thought Dad had been feeding me too many peanut butter sandwiches.”

Was that just a part of growing up, recognizing that everything you’d once trusted didn’t deserve your trust any longer? Was it about forging new paths forward, taking tentative steps?

Without really thinking about it, a blind hand drove me toward the diner. I didn’t want to return to my teensy, half-decorated apartment to be alone, and besides, it was close by. As I drove, I tried to think through my dad’s problems, tried to imagine a way to pay his debts, his medical bills, and to get him into a clinic to overcome his addiction.

But, God, with my own expenses, it seemed impossible. I’d been working at the diner the last five years, and hardly had enough to rub two pennies together. The tips from people who were just driving through, eating biscuits and gravy with unlimited coffee, all at around four in the morning, were usually lackluster. And, beyond that, I’d been spending money on community college for my managerial studies, trying to yank myself up by the bootstraps, as they say.

Parking in the lot near the diner, I was grateful to be one of the only people there—no regulars asking me intimate questions about how I was doing or whatever. I didn’t have the energy for it. As it was after eight-thirty and the dinner rush had strung out, leaving just Marcia to run the diner by herself until midnight. I grabbed my purse and rushed indoors, directly into Marcia’s stringy arms. She was in her 50s, with wrinkles between her eyebrows and beneath her eyes; she was almost like the mother I’d never had.

“Darling, just you sit down over there and I’ll grab you a piece of pie. We need to get some meat on those bones,” Marcia said, pointing toward the far window.

“Just a cup of coffee, Marcia,” I said. “I think putting pie in my body right now would destroy me.”

My stomach grumbled angrily. Had I eaten that day? I couldn’t remember. Everything before the blast of information from my father was a complete haze.

Marcia rolled her eyes and hustled toward the coffee machine, where she poured a deep cup. “No milk, right?”

“Right,” I affirmed, accepting the mug and trekking toward the far booth. I stuck my elbows on the tabletop and leaned heavily on my fists, trying to calm my racing thoughts.

We didn’t have to be doomed. I just had to think hard enough. I just had to plan better.

But then the words pulsed through my brain again: violent consequences. What did that mean? A broken arm? A punch to the face? What did a surface-level threat mean if my dad’s heart didn’t beat correctly any longer?

I wasn’t too confident that Dad wanted to stay alive, anyway. Perhaps the words “violent consequences” meant something different to him, a welcome reprieve after the storm of his life. He’d finally be allowed to rest, to be with Momma, wherever she was. She’d died when I was just a toddler, and all I really knew of her came from a few photographs around the house.

Dad didn’t like to talk about her.

“Refill, honey?” Marcia called, eyeing my half-empty mug of coffee. “I’m making another pot.”

My tongue ticked against the top of my mouth, preparing to respond. But my heart raced so quickly beneath my ribcage, making me hear only a purr and feel only panic.