I thought inheriting my grandma’s house would bring me peace. Instead, it started a war, one I never saw coming. And the person who lit the match?
My own cousin.
My name’s Elena. I’m 27, and I work as a freelance illustrator. I spend most of my days sketching in cafés or on my back porch, coffee in hand, and my dog curled up by my feet.
It’s not a glamorous life, but it’s mine, and I’ve made peace with it.
I don’t talk much about my family. Mostly because there’s not much left of it.
My mom died in a car accident when I was six. After that, my entire world shifted.
While other kids were learning how to ride bikes with their dads or going on family vacations, I was packing up my things and moving into a small cottage with my grandmother, Lily. I always called her Gran.
Gran was everything. She had this soft voice that could calm a storm, and she made the best cinnamon rolls you’d ever taste.
She was stubborn, funny, warm, and sharp as a tack even in her late 70s.
She filled the silence in our house with humming, always some old tune neither of us knew the name of.
It was her and me, through everything.
After Mom passed, my dad pretty much disappeared. I don’t even know where he is now.
Gran never said a bad word about him. She just shook her head and called him “a runner.”
Gran’s other daughter, my aunt Greta, lived in the next town over. She had a daughter, too, my cousin Lydia, who was just a year older than me.
We were never close. Lydia always acted like anything that didn’t directly benefit her was a waste of time. She kept her nails perfectly done, walked around with her nose in the air, and carried that look like the world owed her something.
They showed up for Christmas once in a while, sometimes on Easter, but they never stayed long.
They didn’t call. They didn’t help when Gran was sick or needed a ride to the doctor. It was always me.
Only me.
When Gran passed away last spring, I didn’t cry at the funeral. I didn’t need to. I’d already cried all the tears I had during her final weeks in hospice.
When the lawyer handed me the will and I saw that she’d left me the house, I didn’t feel shocked. Just a quiet kind of heartbreak. The kind that lingers.
The house wasn’t big, just a modest two-bedroom cottage with chipped white paint and a creaky porch swing.
But it was filled with her, with the scent of baked apples and lavender oil, the worn-out crochet blanket she used to wrap around both of us during thunderstorms, and the faded photos of my mom in her prom dress on the mantel.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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