“These are from Brenna’s mother,” I said, flipping slowly through the stack. “Did you know about her?”
Loretta went pale for one brief second before her expression hardened right back into stone. “I did what I had to do. Do you think I’d let some woman trap my son with a broken child? When she came looking for him, I told her to stay away. I refused to let her and her daughter become part of this family.”
Her words landed cruel and cold across the room, and Brenna gripped the edge of the table, her wide eyes fixed on Loretta like she was watching a storm finally break somewhere she couldn’t outrun.
“You destroyed this family,” I said, my voice shaking. “You never even told him he had another daughter.”
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Loretta let out a bitter laugh that filled the whole room. “He found out anyway. That’s exactly why he changed his will. And now you’re just going to let her take everything?”
“Dad left a gift,” Brenna said softly, almost to herself. “He wanted me to have it.”
“This has never been about the money, Grandma. And I won’t let you take anything else away from her.”
Loretta stormed out and slammed the door hard enough to rattle the windowpanes.
I turned to Brenna. “I’m so sorry. I love you, sis.”
“Do you want pancakes?” she asked suddenly, like the entire storm hadn’t just torn through her kitchen.
“Oh,” I said, something loosening in my chest for the first time in days. “I really do.”
We ate together on the porch as the sun dipped low, painting the whole sky in soft, warm color. From that day forward, we started building an entirely different life together, one neither of us had planned on but both of us needed.
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I helped Brenna grow her pottery studio into something bigger than either of us expected. We repaired the leaning old house together, filled it with flowers along every windowsill, and somewhere in the middle of all that work, I rediscovered my own love for painting, decorating her pieces with colors she never would have picked herself.
Word slowly spread. People started coming in from other towns just to buy what we made together. Life wasn’t perfect. It never really is. But it was finally ours. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t living to meet someone else’s carefully drawn expectations.
I was living for us. Brenna and me.
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