Fifteen years ago, my life changed overnight. My brother Edwin stood at his wife’s grave—and then disappeared before the flowers had even settled. No warning, no goodbye. Just gone.
The next thing I knew, three little girls were at my doorstep with a social worker and one overstuffed suitcase. Edwin had left them behind.
They were three, five, and eight. That first night, the silence in the house was heavy.
Dora, the youngest, kept asking, “When is Mommy coming home?”
Jenny, the oldest, stopped talking about it altogether after a week, as if she’d made a decision the rest of us hadn’t.
Lyra, the middle one, refused to unpack her clothes for months. She said she didn’t want to “get too comfortable.”
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