Ryan had spent most of his life learning how to survive on whatever scraps of stability he could gather. At nineteen, he still carried the weight of everything he’d lost—his mother, his childhood, his home, and the small future she’d tried to secure for him before cancer stole her away. Melissa had been the kind of mother who thought ahead, even while dying. She set up a $25,000 trust for her son and made him promise he’d use it for something that would make him proud. College. A first apartment. A chance. His father had promised to protect it. At first, he did.
But grief is unpredictable, and his father eventually fell into the arms of someone who seemed warm and reassuring on the surface. Tracy arrived like a second chance for him but quickly proved to be nothing more than a hollow replacement for what their family lost. She moved in with her son, Connor—same age as Ryan, but the total opposite. Connor strutted through the house like he owned every inch of it. He acted like the world was his stage and everyone else was background noise. Tracy encouraged it, calling him “ambitious,” while she slowly pushed everything of Melissa’s out of sight.
Ryan watched his mother’s belongings vanish one by one under the excuse of “fresh starts.” He said nothing. His father was slipping further into Tracy’s orbit, and Ryan had no ground to stand on besides the promise of the trust account waiting for him at eighteen.
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