When my mother died, I didn’t just lose a parent. I lost the map of my life—and inherited a responsibility so heavy it changed the way I breathed.
Six months earlier, my world had been clean and predictable. I was twenty-five, a structural engineer with a calendar full of deadlines and a brain wired for plans. I had a steady job, a decent apartment, and the kind of future you can explain in one sentence. I was engaged. We had a venue shortlist, a guest list, and a honeymoon in Maui that was already half paid. My fiancée, Jenna, talked about baby names like they were groceries and browsed paint samples for a nursery we hadn’t earned yet.
Life wasn’t perfect, but it made sense.
“James, you work too much,” she’d tell me, lining up vitamin bottles on the counter like she was building a miniature pharmacy. “I’m proud of you. I just want you to be healthy. I want a long life with you.”
It felt like love. It sounded like love. I believed it was love.
Then my mother, Naomi, was killed in a car accident on an errand so ordinary it still makes me sick to think about. She had been picking up birthday candles for my ten-year-old twin sisters, Lily and Maya. One moment she was alive and thinking about frosting and gifts. The next, the police were on my doorstep, and the world I knew fractured.
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