My Aunt Fought for My Brother’s Custody — But I Knew Her Real Reason

The day after I buried my parents, I became an adult. Not because I turned eighteen, but because someone tried to take the only family I had left. And I wasn’t about to let that happen.

Until that week, I had thought adulthood arrived slowly, in gentle steps: your first job, moving out, paying your own bills. I had imagined it as a careful unfolding. But it came instead like a storm that tore open the doors of my childhood and left me standing in the wreckage with a ten-year-old boy clinging to my hand.

The house was silent when we returned from the cemetery. It had taken on a strange, hollow quality, like a shell emptied by the tide. The flowers people had sent crowded the kitchen counters and dining table, their sweetness cloying in the stagnant air.

Casseroles sat untouched. Cards were stacked in uneven piles. Everywhere I looked, there were quiet reminders that people had visited, spoken kind words, and then gone back to their lives, leaving us behind.Continue reading…