The room tilted sideways. I stared at him, waiting for the punchline, waiting for him to laugh and say he was kidding, that this was some bizarre grief-induced joke. But he just sat there, looking at us with this mixture of defiance and guilt, while my aunt—my mother’s sister—held his hand like it was the most natural thing in the world.
“You’re… together?” I repeated, the words feeling foreign in my mouth. “Together together? Like… romantically?”
“We didn’t plan this,” Laura said quickly, her words tumbling out too fast. “Please believe that. We never intended for this to happen. Grief just… it does strange things to people. We leaned on each other after your mom died, and we understood each other’s pain in a way nobody else could, and one thing led to another, and—”
“You’re saying this three months after Mom died,” Robert interrupted, his voice cold and sharp. “Three months. She’s barely been in the ground for ninety days.”
“I know how it sounds,” Dad replied defensively. “I know. But life is short. Losing your mother taught me that. Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. And I don’t want to waste whatever time I have left being alone and miserable.”
That sentence burned through me like acid. I wanted to scream that Mom was the one who lost her life. Not him. She was the one who didn’t get a tomorrow. He got to keep living, keep breathing, keep moving forward—and this was how he chose to do it?
Instead, I sat there completely frozen, my brain struggling to process what I was hearing.
Laura squeezed Dad’s hand harder, and I watched her knuckles turn white.
“We love each other,” she said, her voice gaining confidence. “And we’re getting married.”
The words landed wrong. Too fast. Too practiced. Like they’d rehearsed this conversation beforehand and were delivering their lines. I heard myself make some kind of sound—maybe a gasp, maybe a whimper. I remember nodding, though I don’t remember actually deciding to move my head. My brother didn’t say anything at all. He just stood up, his chair scraping loudly against the hardwood floor, and walked out of the room without a word.
