I hold out the bottle for Olivia, who walks over and takes it from me, spitting it out after a sip. “That’s not whiskey.” She’s coughing and trying to catch her breath.

“It’s like whiskey,” I say, looking at the bottle. “It’s just homemade.”

“I can’t breathe,” she says through her coughing. “It burns so bad.”

“Enough!” Casey shouts, and my mother sits on the couch and puts her hands in her lap as if she’s going to be watching a movie. Olivia looks at me almost like she doesn’t know what to say, and I just shrug.

“I think you just do it like a Band-Aid,” I say. “Just come out with it.”

“So I was in the gluten-free section at the grocery story, and my phone rings,” she says. I look at Casey, and I almost laugh at the way he is bouncing on his heels. “It was from an unknown number, and I didn’t answer the first time or the second, but then I got pissed.”

“Darlin’,” Casey says between clenched teeth, “can we go just a touch faster?”

“I’m trying, Casey,” she says, and he just nods at her. If it was anyone else, I think he would have swore, which makes this even more interesting. “So, I pick up the phone with an angry tone.” She motions with her phone to her ear. “And right when I’m about to tell the person I have no comment, he tells me his name is Detective Gonzalez with the LAPD.”

“Oh my God,” my father says.

“Well, it seems that our apartment was broken into,” Olivia says, and her hands start to shake. “According to the detective, walls were damaged. Every single drawer was thrown on the floor. It was a mess. Every single thing we had there was broken or vandalized.”

“Holy shit,” I say, sitting up. “What do you mean everything?”

“Well, he sent me an email with pictures, and it’s horrible,” she says, handing me the phone so I can see the pictures. Our couches are shredded like people thought we were hiding something in it. The television is shattered. The kitchen cabinets are empty with all the plates on the floor in little pieces. The fridge was tipped over, my bedroom destroyed. They slashed my bed with the same knife as the couch. My drawers are thrown everywhere, and then I swipe to Olivia’s, and I gasp. “It’s everything I have ever had.”

“It’s in shreds,” I say, but then I see the writing on the wall.

You’ll get what’s owed to you.

“What does that mean?” I ask Olivia, who now has tears streaming down her face. That’s the straw that broke Casey’s back because he storms over and grabs the phone from my hands to look at the pictures.