The Night of the Shattered Window

Three months after my mother married my stepfather, I moved into this unfamiliar house. My stepbrother Shen Cizhou’s room was at the end of the hallway. In our day-to-day lives, we treated each other with distant, formal politeness; apart from the necessary pleasantries at the dinner table, we had almost no real interaction. He spoke very little, but his gaze always bore down on me heavily, as though appraising some strange intruder that had strayed into his territory. Until one deep night, the sharp crack of shattering glass ripped through this paper-thin calm.