At My Grandfather’s Will Reading My Father Said I Would Get Nothing

But those questions didn’t last. It was easier for everyone if there were no updates. Easier if I remained something unfinished, a version of myself frozen at eighteen, rather than a person continuing to live without them.

My father remarried within two years. New house. New routines.

New photographs. I saw them sometimes online—holiday dinners, birthdays, carefully arranged family portraits. There was always a place where I should have been, but no one mentioned it.

The captions were always the same. “Family is everything.”

I learned not to look too long. The first year on my own was the hardest.

Not because of the work—I adapted to that quickly—but because of the silence. There’s a difference between being alone and being cut off. One is temporary.