For the first time since she walked in, I smiled.
“Jonah saw it too,” she added.
“What did he think?”
“He asked questions,” she said. “Which is more than I did at his age.”
She dug into her bag, pulled out her phone, and slid it across the table.
On the screen was a paused video of a lanky nineteen‑year‑old kid on a campus lawn somewhere, hoodie half‑zipped, wind messing up his hair.
He looked like them and like neither of them.
Elizabeth hit play.
Jonah stared into the front‑facing camera, jaw tight.
“They told me my sister made all this up,” he said in the clip. “Turns out there’s a tape. Turns out sometimes the person you were taught to resent is the only one telling the truth.”
He swallowed hard.
“If you ever see this, Taran,” he added, “I’m… I don’t know what I am.
Sorry. Confused. Grateful you didn’t pay my tuition, I guess, because now I know it wasn’t mine to expect.”
The video ended.
My chest did something complicated.
“You didn’t send this?” I asked.
Elizabeth shook her head.
“He posted it to some tiny account. Took it down after an hour. I grabbed it before he did.”
“Why show me?”
“Because you deserved to know someone in that house believes you now,” she said.
“Even if he doesn’t know what to do with that belief yet.”
We finished our coffee talking about safer things—her nursing shifts, my ridiculous board meetings, Lenora’s latest gardening obsession. When we stepped into the parking lot, the Texas sun hit us full in the face.
“Can we…” Elizabeth started, then stopped. “Can we try to have something?
Not the way it was. Not pretending none of this happened. Just… something that belongs to us and not to them.”
The wind tugged at my hair.
I thought about all the versions of family I’d held and lost.
About how easy it would be to say no to anything with my last name attached.
“Maybe,” I said. “If we build it slow. If we don’t talk about me forgiving them.
If we talk about you not becoming them instead.”
Her shoulders dropped a fraction, like she’d been waiting for a verdict.
“I can work with that,” she said.
We hugged again, less awkward this time.
As she walked to her car, she called over her shoulder.
“I saved a copy of that drawing, you know. The one with the house and the sun. I kept it in my diary for years.”
Of course she had.
The kid version of me wanted to sob.
The adult version just tucked the information somewhere deep and warm.
Lenora died on a Tuesday.
There’s no soft way to say it.
She’d been slowing down for months—forgetting where she put her keys, needing to rest halfway up the stairs, falling asleep halfway through her beloved crime shows.
The doctor called it “age‑related decline” in that maddeningly casual tone medical professionals use when you’re supposed to take comfort in the fact that nothing dramatic is happening, just the inevitable.
One morning, I brought her coffee and found her still in bed, eyes open, a small, peaceful smile on her face like she’d just heard the end of a joke.
Her hand was cold when I took it.
There were no dramatic hospital scenes. No machines. No countdown.
Just quiet.
Just my heart doing something I didn’t have words for.
People talk about losing parents like being cut loose from an anchor.
For me, losing Lenora felt like watching the scaffolding I’d built my entire life against finally come down.
The house wasn’t going to fall.
But it was never going to look the same.
A social worker once told me that grief is just love with nowhere to go.
Mine went into tasks.
Calls to the funeral home.
Emails to the few blood relatives she still spoke to. Arrangements for the small memorial service at a chapel just outside Cedar Rapids because, in a twist of cosmic humor, that’s where she wanted to be buried.
“I started my life there,” she’d said once, half‑asleep in her recliner. “Might as well go back to haunt the same cornfields.”
So we went back.
Driving into Iowa felt like rewinding a tape I’d already digitized.
The same battered strip malls.
The same gas stations. The same turnoff that led to the street where my grandparents’ house used to stand before someone flipped it and painted it gray.
The chapel was small and white with stained glass windows that cast colored stripes onto the hardwood floor. We kept the service simple.
Her favorite hymn.
A slideshow of photos—her as a young teacher, her holding puppies, her standing on my high school porch with a look that said she’d fight any administrator who crossed me.
I stood at the front with my notes shaking slightly in my hand.
“I called her my guardian on paperwork,” I said, voice steady. “What I meant was ‘the person who chose me when others didn’t.’”
I talked about her blue mail box and the tall kitchen cabinet and the day she taped my torn drawing back together without saying, “This is stupid” or “Grow up.”
I didn’t mention my parents.
They were there.
Of course they were.
They sat three rows back on the right, stiff and composed. My mother wore a black dress that probably cost more than the entire service.
My father looked smaller somehow, shoulders caved in on themselves.
They watched me like they were seeing a stranger give a eulogy they should’ve been giving.
When it was over, we stepped out into the thin Iowa sunlight. People clustered in groups, hugging, sharing stories about Lenora and her stubbornness and the way she snuck books into children’s hands like contraband.
I felt a presence at my shoulder and braced myself for Darlene’s perfume.
Instead, a male voice cleared his throat.
“Hey,” he said.
I turned.
Jonah stood a few feet away, hands jammed in the pockets of a too‑small suit jacket. His hair was longer than in the video, curling at the nape of his neck.
He had our father’s nose and my grandmother’s eyes.
“Hi,” I said.
“I’m, uh.” He gestured vaguely. “Jonah.”
“I figured,” I said, a small smile tugging at my mouth.
He huffed out a breath that might’ve been a laugh.
“I’m sorry about your…” He glanced back at the chapel. “About Lenora.
Mom always called her the nosy neighbor. I didn’t know she was… that.”
That.
A life raft.
A scaffolding.
A home.
“She was everything they weren’t,” I said.
He nodded like that tracked.
We stood there for a second, the weight of shared DNA and wildly different histories pulsing between us.
“I watched your video,” he blurted. “The porch one.
And the court summary thing some blog did after. They didn’t want me to. Said it was all ‘spin.’”
“Did you believe them?” I asked.
“Not after the tape,” he said.
“Kinda hard to ‘spin’ a car door.”
He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets.
“I’m not here to ask you for money,” he added quickly. “Or to tell you to forgive them. I just… I wanted to say I’m sorry they did that to you.
And I’m sorry I benefited from it.”
“You were a kid,” I said.
“Yeah, but…” He kicked at a crack in the pavement. “They always framed it like you abandoned us. Like you turned your back on family.
We prayed for you at dinner sometimes, like you were the prodigal child. I thought you’d just… left. It wasn’t until college, when everything started adding up weird, that I started asking questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Like why we moved right after you left,” he said.
“Why Grandpa never really talked about you. Why Mom looked like she’d seen a ghost every time someone mentioned your name.”
He looked up at me then, eyes raw in a way I recognized from my own reflection.
“I guess I’m asking,” he said slowly, “if it’s okay that I believe you and still… care about them. Even though they’re messed up.”
Have you ever wanted to choose yourself without having to erase where you came from?
I thought about all the nights I’d wished someone in that house would pick me, just once.
“Of course it’s okay,” I said.
“Loyalty and honesty aren’t mutually exclusive. You can love them and still see what they did. You can draw your own boundaries and still go home for Thanksgiving if that’s what you want.
Just don’t let them make my yes or no your responsibility.”
He exhaled like he’d been waiting for that permission and hadn’t realized it.
“Do you… want any kind of relationship?” he asked. “With me, I mean. Not… not as a bridge.
Just as, like, two people who share some DNA and a ridiculous chin.”
I laughed then, an actual laugh that startled both of
