When I was five, it was a warm day, the kind where the air hummed with insects and the smell of cut grass. I remember the white lace of my dress, the scratch of the wicker chair on Grandma’s porch. Then, her car pulled away. My mom. She just… drove off. Grandma held my hand, told me, “Your mama loves you, honey. But her new husband doesn’t want kids.” It was a sentence that carved itself into my soul. A deep, aching void that no amount of summer sunshine could fill. For years, I kept a stack of crayon drawings under my bed. Pictures of my mom, always smiling, always coming back. I’d spend hours, just hours, meticulously coloring her hair, her dress, the house where we’d live when she finally returned. She never did.
Grandma became my world. She taught me to bake, to plant tomatoes, to find constellations in the endless night sky. Her hugs were a fortress, her laughter a melody against the silence my mom left behind. She told me stories, she dried my tears, she showed me what unconditional love looked like. She was everything. My entire universe revolved around her. And I loved her with a fierceness that swallowed all the lingering hurt, all the questions about the woman who abandoned me.
As I grew older, the drawings stopped. The hope faded into a dull ache. I made peace with it, or at least, I thought I had. She made her choice. And Grandma had made hers too, by choosing me. I focused on my life, my work, cherishing every moment with the only family I knew. Every birthday, every Christmas, it was just us. A quiet, contented life, built on the solid rock of Grandma’s unwavering love.
Then, Grandma got sick. It was fast, relentless. I stayed by her side, holding her frail hand, telling her how much I loved her, how grateful I was. One afternoon, her breathing shallow, her eyes cloudy, she murmured something. “The attic… old box… not what you think…” Her voice was barely a whisper. I brushed it off as delirium.
After she was gone, the house felt cavernous. Empty. Going through her things was a grief-stricken blur. But her last words echoed. I found the old wooden box in the attic, tucked away behind dusty photo albums. It was marked, in my mother’s elegant handwriting, “My Life.”
Inside, not photographs, not trinkets. Letters. Dozens of them. Dated, stained with what looked like tears. I pulled out the first one. It wasn’t addressed to me. It was addressed to Grandma.
“Please, Mother, just let me see her. He’s gone, the husband. He left. I have nowhere to go but I need my baby. You can’t just keep her from me. You can’t!”
My blood ran cold. Mother?
I snatched another letter, then another. They weren’t from a woman who had abandoned her child for a new husband. They were pleas. Desperate, raw, heartbroken pleas from a woman begging to get her daughter back. My mother was trying to come home. And Grandma… Grandma was turning her away. There were no letters back. Just my mother’s increasingly frantic attempts, detailing how Grandma had told her she wasn’t fit, that she’d “made her choice,” that I was “better off.”
The final letter was short. “You win, Mother. Just tell her I loved her. Tell her I didn’t want to leave.”
My breath hitched. My hands trembled, the letters scattering around me. The smell of dust, the silence of the empty house. It wasn’t the new husband. It was never the new husband. GRANDMA LIED. My entire life, the story I believed, the abandonment I mourned, the love that filled the void… it was all built on a lie. A monstrous, beautiful, devastating lie. And the woman who was my world, the woman I loved more than anything, was the one who kept my mother from me. She wasn’t saving me. SHE WAS KEEPING ME. And now, she’s gone. And I’m left with nothing but the echoes of a truth that shatters everything I thought I knew.
