I was wrong.

The will reading should have been a formality. I arrived wearing my mother’s blazer, the fabric still faintly holding her perfume, my hands trembling as I twisted my shirt hem for comfort.

Across the table sat my father’s estranged sister, Aunt Dina, dressed in a tight red cocktail dress and wearing a smirk that unsettled me. When the lawyer announced that the house—my childhood home—was being left to her, I thought I had misheard. My protests were met with Dina’s gloating and the lawyer’s shrug, as if the ink on that paper mattered more than the years my parents had raised me there.

Two days later, she arrived at my doorstep with no sympathy, no hesitation, and a simple order: I had twenty-four hours to get out. Pleading with her got me nowhere. She dismissed me