I believed her for about three weeks until that fresh start became the ultimate leverage they used to control my life and my space. My mother kept a spare key for emergencies, but the first emergency was just Tiffany needing a place for her friends to stay during a concert.
She had texted me on a Thursday to say that two of her friends were going to crash at my place because the local hotels were far too expensive. I told her that I had my son that weekend, but she replied that they would barely be there and told me not to make things awkward.
I ended up changing the sheets in Leo’s room and hiding my work documents in a closet while my mother told me that everything would be fine. When I came home on Sunday, the apartment smelled like smoke and cheap body spray, and there were empty beer bottles lined up on my kitchen counter.
“See, there was no harm done,” Tiffany texted me later, even though I spent three hours cleaning someone else’s mess off my son’s favorite blanket. The second incident involved a distant cousin from Raleigh who needed to stay over because it was raining too hard for him to drive home.