“I know what you did, Samuel. I’m going to expose you, and you, you suck.”

Hazel had started dialing Samuel the moment she flung her apartment door open. Now she was pacing her tiny living room, trying to avoid the sharp edges of her glass coffee table as the floor swayed beneath her feet.

It felt like a miracle that she’d managed to get home at all. The Uber guy had been shooting worried glances at her every thirty seconds of the fifteen-minute drive from downtown to her cozy Riverside apartment. That didn’t surprise her, if she looked as disgusting as she felt.

“Hair of the dog,” Frizzy had said, as she’d handed Hazel another shot and hoisted her from the bathroom floor. “And thanks for your quality aim, honey,” she said, pointing at Hazel’s newly anointed best pal. “You’re a classy chick.” Never could Hazel have guessed this morning that by this afternoon she would be sitting on the floor of a toilet stall in a dive bar doing a vodka shot, but this is what her life had come to. And it was all Samuel’s fault. Hence the drunk dialing as soon as she came through the door.

“You’re drunk!” Samuel sounded more amused than he had any right to be, considering that she had just threatened him.

“You stole my stuff, Samuel. I don’t know how you got it, but I’m gonna find out, and I’m gonna get you fired, you little... measly, mustachioed, momma’s boy. You... big bag of bullying bullcrap.” Wow, she never knew she was a drunk alliterator. Could that be useful?

“You’re drunk, Hazel, which is probably a state you should visit more often. You know what your problem is? You are way too uptight. You’re like that needy kid in class who knew the only attention they were gonna get was from the teacher, so they made it their life’s mission to be perfect. It’s a shame really, because you’re pretty hot. But hot won’t do you much good when you are as boring and perfect as you are. I couldn’t believe you were late this morning! That was hysterical.”

“I’ll get you, Samuel. You’ll regret stealing from me. I’m smarter than you, remember?”

Samuel barked a laugh. “Good luck, Miss Goody-two-shoes. Have at it.” And the phone went dead.

Hazel made her way to the bathroom and peeled off her clothes. She would feel better after a hot shower… or five. Then she would get into her pajamas and write to her dad. Her dad always helped her figure things out. After the shower Hazel felt a bit more lucid. Her head was still spinning, but she felt like she could get her thoughts together for a letter. She sat down at her desk.

Dear Dad,

Don’t panic. I’m a little off course right at this moment, but I’ll figure out a way to get back on. I had a little problem at work this morning. Don’t be too angry at me, but I lost the project. You know The Project. The one that was going to get me the equity partnership. The one that was going to make all of our worries about my career and money and taking care of Mom disappear. I’m going to fix it, though. I just need to figure out how. Any words of wisdom, just send them my way.

Love, Hazel

She folded the single sheet of paper and popped in into an envelope, already addressed to “Dad.” Pulling open her bottom desk drawer, she lifted the top off of an old shoebox (she had eight more of these boxes in her closet), carefully placed the letter on top of a pile, and pushed the lid down firmly. She’d need a new box soon.

Hazel hadn’t told a soul that she wrote letters to her dead father. She was well aware of how weird it was, thank you very much, but it helped her. And since her dad had died when she was five-FIVE-Hazel had had a lot of years to accumulate these advice-seeking, soul-baring epistles.

Indigo had always been very relaxed about the mothering thing. She hadn’t been neglectful or cruel, she just hadn’t been particularly motherly. Indigo had been hopelessly lonely after Hazel’s father had died in a horrible car accident. She was pregnant with Hazel’s sister Sylvie at the time and worried about everything. She had wanted a little buddy to keep her company and a shoulder to cry on. Hazel had tried desperately to give her both. They’d had fun. Sure, they had moved a lot, and they’d played a lot of games that included candlelight and blankets. Hazel didn’t ever have new clothes, only ones from Goodwill, and most of the time they ate leftover fast food from the restaurant where Indigo was currently working. But it had been fun. Hazel, her mom, and her baby sister were on an adventure together. Indigo had told her stories about her big, strong, smart Daddy. How proud he would have been of her. How pleased he would have been that she was such a help to her Mama.

It wasn’t until Hazel turned thirteen, and had to go to middle school, that she realized how unusual her life circumstances were. None of the other thirteen-year-olds had under the table jobs washing dishes or went to work every night with their mom, let alone a little sister sleeping soundly in her car seat within view of her mom’s position at the drive-in window. None of the other thirteen-year-olds bought their clothing at the Goodwill. Indigo had been wrong when she had told Hazel that corduroy was making a comeback. None of the other thirteen-year-olds brought cold burgers, still in their paper wrapping, for their lunch every day. And they weren’t as impressed by Hazel’s extensively colored-in travel map as Indigo had told her they would be.

After the first six months of middle school, Hazel didn’t want to be Hazel anymore, and she wanted a different Mama. She wanted a parent like the one that picked up Emma and Christy from school every day in a BMW. She wanted a parent who gave out report card gifts like Ariella’s Mom, or who came in to school on Career Day to talk about being an architect like Jordan’s Dad. She wanted her father.

According to Indigo, Robert Blakemore had been everything that a father should be and more. In her darkest moments, the absolute worst ones, (like the time Indigo left Hazel to look after the baby when she had a major book report due the next day) Hazel had flirted with the daydream that it was Indigo who had died in that car crash and not her dad.

So she’d started writing to him. At first, she just wrote for help or advice, or to complain about Indigo, or to cry about her classmates’ teasing. But then she started to get all weird about it. She started thinking that maybe, just maybe, these letters, these prayers to her father, were making it up to Heaven somehow. And, if that were true, he was probably getting pretty tired of hearing whining and moaning. How could she expect him to be proud of her when all she did was complain? Her thirteen-year-old brain had decided that she needed to be someone in these letters that her father could be proud of. She would show him how well she took care of Indigo, how good she was with the baby, how well she was doing in school, and one day, if she ever got the chance to meet him in Heaven, his first words would be, “I’m so proud of you, honey!”

She had never stopped writing. She’d meant to. As an adult, she understood that writing to a dead father was probably some expression of her emotional dysfunction, but it made her feel better. It kept her focused and driven, and it kept her dad close to her heart, and that’s where she needed him.

And now there was a whisper in her heart. Sometimes it happened this way. Sometimes after she had written to her dad, he spoke back. Gently, quietly, but she always knew it was him. And this time her heart whispered… “Go to Italy.”

She smiled. The room spun around her as she tucked herself under her covers, but she felt suddenly calm. She had been thinking for hours, and she was out of ideas. There was only one option before her. One crazy, terrifying, and foolhardy option. She would let Indigo fly her to Italy and pray that this stupid house was real and not some phantom house invented in Indigo’s expansive imagination. She would flip the house with her mom and pray that there was cash at the end of it that would cover her equity buy-in. She would wait and watch Samuel go down in a ball of fire and flames as he tried to manage this project that was way over his head, and at the end of the summer, she would come back to Jacksonville. Professional, competent, talented Hazel would come back to Blackwell and Crawley and show them what a true equity partner looked like. Everything would be okay. Hazel wouldn’t allow any other option.