After losing the only person who ever truly saw him, Rhys is pulled into a storm of inheritance, hidden truths, and fractured loyalty. As family secrets come to light, he discovers that blood doesn’t always define family—sometimes, it’s the people who stay when everyone else walks away.
The day we laid my grandfather to rest, the sky mirrored the ache in my chest—stretched thin and heavy, a dull gray blanket threatening to split.
I stood at his casket, still and silent, while strangers murmured hollow condolences and offered mechanical touches on my shoulder, like they were checking to see if I might shatter. I didn’t belong to any of them—not really. The only person I’d ever belonged to was lying in that box.
Grandpa Ezra was more than family. He was my safe place, my anchor, the only adult who ever really listened when I spoke—who looked at me and saw me.
My mother, Lenora, was always somewhere else—her attention swallowed by charity galas and a buzzing phone. My father had vanished into a bottle long before his liver gave out. And though no one ever said it aloud, I’d long felt like I didn’t quite fit the mold they claimed I came from.
My sister Marianne was a storm of quiet bitterness, the kind that grows in silence and taints everything it touches.
But Grandpa? His love was simple, unshakable, and real.
After the ceremony, the air felt foreign—like it wasn’t mine anymore. It clung to me, thick with incense, old hymns, and words no one had the courage to say out loud. Around me, people drifted, sipping cold church coffee and whispering about grief they hadn’t earned.
I stayed frozen in the memory of my hand on his coffin—trying to hold on to the texture of goodbye.
Then I felt her. My mother, standing behind me.
“Rhys,” she said, her voice sharp around the edges. “Come with me a moment.”
She didn’t wait for a response. Her manicured hand wrapped around my arm, gently but firmly steering me away from the crowd. We ended up in a dim corner of the church, under a stained-glass window where even the saints looked like they were done pretending.
Her perfume arrived before her words—overly sweet, like wilting roses in stagnant water. It mingled with the incense and the old wood of the church, turning my stomach.
“You did a good job with your grandfather,” she said, brushing some imagined lint off her silk sleeve. “I heard he left you the house. That was… very kind of him.”
“Yeah,” I said, my throat dry. “It’s what he wanted.”
She smiled—a small, tight thing that didn’t reach her eyes.
“Well,” she said, voice like velvet stretched over steel, “we should talk about that.”