As I dropped the phone on the bed, the truth settled over me.
I wasn’t just dropping a call.
I was dropping the only family I might ever have.
The room felt too small for the grief that followed. I sank to the floor beside the bed and cried the way I had the night we buried Dad. Not the polite tears I’d mastered over the years. Not the quiet, controlled kind.
This was raw and loud.
My chest hurt from the force of it.
Every loss I had swallowed over the years tore open at once—Dad’s death, five years of marriage that felt like slow suffocation, the humiliation at work, the threats hanging over Olivia’s head.
I pressed my fist against my mouth to keep from screaming.
“I didn’t deserve this,” I whispered into the empty room.
Somewhere between anger and heartbreak, something hardened
