I walked in from the funeral and my husband wouldn’t even let me sit down. He looked straight at me and said, his voice ice cold, “Mom left everything to me. You have two days to pack.”
I had cared for my mother in law for ten years.
Ten years of appointments and pills and midnight fevers, of lifting and cleaning and swallowing my own exhaustion so she wouldn’t see it. And yet that day, after the service, after the pastor’s soft words about peace and rest, after the last clods of wet earth had thudded onto the casket, I came home and found Ryan, his sister Lisa, and a man in a suit already waiting in my living room. On the coffee table sat a neat stack of papers, arranged like they’d rehearsed this moment in the car on the way back from the cemetery.
The man opened the pages and read clearly, “The house goes to Ryan. Elena gets five thousand dollars for her help. You have forty eight hours to be out.”
I didn’t argue.
I didn’t cry. I just walked outside, like a stranger in my own home. Three days later, I opened the envelope Margaret had pressed into my hand before she passed.
And that’s when everything began. I came home from my mother in law’s funeral with the smell of wet earth still clinging to my coat. February had been doing that thing it does in the Midwest, gray sky pressed low and heavy, air damp without committing to rain, the kind of cold that seeps into your bones and stays there.
My shoes were still damp from the cemetery grass. My hands were still shaking from the moment I’d let go of the casket and watched it disappear into the ground. Ten minutes earlier I’d been standing beside a grave, listening to a pastor talk about rest and peace, while people I barely recognized shifted on folding chairs and tugged their scarves tighter.
The funeral home’s van was parked along the curb like a quiet promise that someone, somewhere, would clean up after the grief and return the world to normal. I expected silence when I unlocked the front door. Instead, I walked into something that felt rehearsed.
They were already there, sitting in my living room. My living room. Ryan, my husband, was on the couch with his legs crossed like he owned the place.
Lisa sat beside him, her purse on her lap, posture straight and alert, almost pleased. Across from them, in the armchair near the window where Margaret used to sit with her tea, was a man I had never seen before. He wore a gray suit that looked too formal for a house that still smelled faintly of antiseptic wipes and Margaret’s lavender soap.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
