Demons clash with inheritance claims as secrets unfold and violence is unleashed over twelve harrowing hours trapped in a house with the worst thing imaginable: family.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from You Should Have Been Nicer to My Mom by Vincent Tirado, which releases on March 10th 2026.
When Papi Ramon, the patriarch of the wealthy Abreu family dies, he gives the family one last message in the will: “One of you is el bacà, the demon that I made a deal with. Get rid of them or you will be damned.” Xiomara, the uncontested favorite of Papi Ramon (and therefore the least liked in the family), watches as everyone dismisses this as the joke of a senile old man and demands the lawyer obtain the previous will Papi wrote.
While the lawyer drives back to his office, a storm breaks out, forcing the entire family—Xiomara’s aunts and uncles and cousins—to remain in the house. And the words of Papi’s will hangs over their heads even heavier than the rain clouds. Over the course of the night, scandal after scandal is revealed to the public about the family. Suddenly a tense few hours of surviving her family turns into a vicious night of recrimination, violence, accusations…and murder.
Xiomara is faced with an impossible task: uproot a demon and somehow kill it or excise the ghosts that linger within her own family.
And the clock is ticking…
EXCERPT
Grief. Xiomara settled on that word for explanation. She was grieving and feeling guilty, and the combination of the two was heightening all the wrong senses, twisting her perception of what used to be against what simply was. The truth was she loved her grandfather dearly, and was attempting to justify her absence in the last few years of his life.
The only thing wrong with Papi Ramon’s house was that he was gone.
Xiomara stopped in front of his bedroom door. Across from it had been her mom’s room. It was strange the way she felt like there was a direct line between the two. A link that kept the other’s memories alive. Through Xiomara, Mami could relive her childhood. To Papi Ramon, Xiomara was a lovely reminder of the daughter he favored.
Without either of them, Xiomara was an anchor without a ship, weighed down and unable to stop as she continued down the length of the hallway. As a child, the house had felt so big to her that it might as well have been the size of the whole world, with undiscovered secrets lying in wait. But right now? It felt snug. And with the rest of her extended family coming for the will reading, snug didn’t mean cozy. It meant suffocating.
Somehow she knew it was only going to get tighter.
She looked away from the doors, to the end of the hall, where a window that seemed to have been glued shut did little to let in the gray light from outside. It hadn’t always been glued shut, Xiomara remembered. Her grandmother left it cracked to keep the air from going stale—when had that changed again?
Do you want to fly?
Xiomara shuddered and turned away, rubbing that small spot behind her neck until it was soothed. Her gut told her to head back downstairs, to leave the second floor and return to the library immediately. She frowned at the impulse, not knowing where it came from. None of her memories were so bad that they validated the apprehension she felt, constantly buzzing beneath her skin. Sure, Xiomara was too afraid to venture up the steps alone—the eyes—but the rest of her childhood memories were largely positive. She stalked forward, pushing against the unknown phobia of the window while relaying the good memories in her head. Xiomara either played with Naomi in the library, watched cartoons in the dining room, or sat in Papi Ramon’s study while he regaled her of the time he’d been a pastor.
Oh, right. He used to be a pastor. How did she forget about that? It was back in DR, before Mami was born but sometime after Marisa. He was very poor as a pastor, and so he and Xiomara’s grandmother, Mami Inez, struggled. With his last thousand dollars, he decided to create his own business—A-B Millennium—and only flourished from there. It was like God had decided to reward him for all the years he’d spent guiding His sheep. There were entire hours dedicated to Papi’s experience as a pastor, while she was still small enough to fit on his lap. Mostly on Sundays, because Xiomara always got in trouble for falling asleep between the pews and Mami was so embarrassed she’d want Papi Ramon to set her straight. But each time, Papi Ramon would only chuckle and bounce his adorable (his words) granddaughter on his knee while she complained about how tedious Sunday school always was.
“What about church is so boring?” he asked.
“All we do is sit and pray.” She pouted. “Or stand and pray. Or kneel and pray. Can’t you just teach me how to do what you did?”
“Preach?” he teased.
“No! Egg-sersize!”
Xiomara blinked. The memory had hit her like a slap upside the head. Papi Ramon wasn’t just a pastor—he was an exorcist. A traveling one, if she remembered correctly. What a strange background for a successful businessman. Back then, Xiomara was too young to know anything about demons or that an exorcist had to be appointed by the Vatican.
And she was pretty sure the Vatican had never once approached Papi Ramon for such a thing. For one thing, he was Pentecostal, not Catholic. And no governing body within that denomination decided who could and couldn’t be exorcists. She’d remember if that were the case, otherwise. Except . . .
Would I?
For she was finding that memory was a tricky thing, and in the hour she had been at home, she’d already been assaulted by odd recollections she had no choice but to consider as facts, while “remembering” things that seemed like they should have been ingrained in her. Xiomara rubbed the back of her head, nearly sent into vertigo by the memory of Papi Ramon doubling over in laugher. He always thought her awkward pronunciation of the word exorcist was the cutest thing in the world.
What he didn’t find so cute was when she kept going.
“He didn’t like talking about demons,” Xiomara said out loud as if to her reflection. It moved in time with her as she dug a little deeper to why. Unpleasant thoughts suddenly jumped to the surface. When the topic came up, he couldn’t help but shift his eyes around, as if searching for something. He’d try to hide it in that laugh of his, but once Xiomara realized it, she couldn’t stop noticing it. And once she did, she would push. Most of the time, Papi Ramon made an excuse to get away, once even practically dumping her off his lap to “take a call.”
Except one time . . .
She remembered it, or “remembered” it—whichever it was didn’t matter. But in that moment, Papi held a stern facial expression. His eyes went tight and he squared his jaw, and at the time, she thought she was in trouble, like she had asked about something forbidden. Looking back, however, she didn’t read annoyance in his expression.
She read absolute terror.
He forced his eyes straight ahead, as if avoiding the gaze of some creature as he leaned over and whispered into her ear. She listened now for those words . . .
And found she couldn’t hear anything. What did he say? Why couldn’t she remember? Bits and pieces of information slipped in between blinks, but nothing she could latch onto until, suddenly, the tangential answer appeared in her mind: that of her wetting the bed for weeks. Of Josefina getting sick of washing the sheets daily. He’d said something unpleasant— so horrific that it had scarred her as a child. But where was that scar now?
What the hell did Papi Ramon say to me?
