Uncle Ross wrote, this feels extreme, kiddo. families fight.
Wendy stared at the word kiddo, a nickname she hated, and felt something inside her settle into iron. She responded only once, to Darlene: She grabbed me by the hair after surgery while I held my newborn daughter. If that is your definition of a family fight, do not contact me again.
Darlene did not reply.
The eviction itself became less dramatic than Wendy had imagined, which in some ways made it more final. There were no lawn theatrics visible to her because she chose not to be there. She had considered going, then imagined Suzanne crying on the walkway, Philip attempting bluster, Cheryl filming selective angles for social media, and decided that witnessing their displacement was not the same as healing from what they had done.
So on the morning of service completion, she stayed home with Paige in the rocker beside the couch and refreshed a county status page Marcus had shown Mitchell. The updates were bureaucratic and dry. Service complete. Compliance window active. Inventory transfer scheduled. There was something almost holy in the dryness of it. No editorializing. No family mythology. Just events.
Mitchell went out only long enough to meet Marcus and the deputy at the property, then returned with a face that told Wendy more than the words.
“It’s done,” he said.
She waited.
“They signed. They took essentials. The rest gets handled through the formal process.”
“Did they say anything?”
He exhaled. “Philip called me a traitor. Suzanne cried. Cheryl wanted to know whether the guest room furniture counted as hers because she’d stored clothes there.”
Wendy laughed once. It came out closer to a sob.
Mitchell sat beside her. “You do not have to feel good today.”
That permission mattered more than he knew.
Because what Wendy felt was not triumph. Not clean relief. Not even uncomplicated justice. It was grief braided with release. Grief for the fantasy she had apparently still kept alive somewhere inside herself—the fantasy that one day her mother would act like a mother, her father like a father, her sister like someone capable of seeing another person’s pain without ranking it. Release because fantasy no longer had legal standing.