The knock at my apartment door came three days after Grandma’s funeral. I wasn’t surprised to find Pamela standing there – grief has a way of bringing ghosts back into your life. What shocked me was seeing fear in her eyes for the first time.
“Jason knows,” she blurted out before I could speak. My little brother – the golden child she’d kept while discarding me like yesterday’s trash – had received a letter from Grandma before she passed. Twenty-two years of lies unraveled in one afternoon.
I’ll admit I felt a dark satisfaction watching her squirm. The woman who coldly told ten-year-old me I was “in the way” of her new family now begged me to fix the broken relationship with her precious son. The poetic justice would have made Grandma proud.
Meeting Jason was like discovering a missing piece of myself. We talked for hours about everything from our shared hatred of cilantro to how differently our lives had unfolded. When he asked why our mother gave me away, I simply said, “She wanted a fresh start. You were part of that. I wasn’t.”
Now when Pamela’s calls come through, I let them ring. She made her choice long ago – Grandma just made sure she couldn’t hide from it forever. Sometimes the best revenge isn’t anger, but living well and letting the truth do its work.
