I thought inheriting my grandma’s house would bring me peace. Instead, it sparked a battle I never saw coming. And the person who started it?
My own cousin. My name’s Abigail. I’m 27, a freelance illustrator.
I spend my days sketching in cafés or on my back porch, coffee in hand, my dog curled up at my feet. It’s not a fancy life, but it’s mine, and I’ve come to love it. I don’t talk much about my family.
There’s not much left to talk about. My mom died in a car accident when I was six. After that, my world turned upside down.
While other kids were learning to ride bikes or going on family trips, I was packing my things and moving into a small cottage with my grandmother, Hazel. I always called her Gran. Gran was everything to me.
Her gentle voice could hush any worry, and she made the best cinnamon rolls you’d ever taste. She was stubborn, funny, warm, and sharp as a whip even in her late 70s. She filled our quiet house with humming, always some old tune we didn’t know the name of.
It was just her and me, through it all. After Mom passed, my dad vanished. I don’t even know where he is now.
Gran never said a bad word about him. She’d just shake her head and call him “a wanderer.”
Gran’s other daughter, my aunt Marla, lived in the next town over. She had a daughter, my cousin Paige, a year older than me.
We were never close. Paige acted like anything that didn’t serve her was a waste of time. She kept her nails perfect, walked with her nose up, and had this air like the world owed her something.
They’d show up for Christmas now and then, sometimes Easter, but they never stayed long. They didn’t call. They didn’t help when Gran was sick or needed a ride to the doctor.
It was always me. Just me. When Gran passed away last spring, I didn’t cry at the funeral.
I’d already shed all my tears during her final weeks in hospice. When the lawyer handed me the will and I saw she’d left me the house, I wasn’t surprised. Just heartbroken, in a quiet way that lingers.
The house wasn’t grand—just a modest two-bedroom cottage with peeling white paint and a creaky porch swing. But it was full of her: the smell of baked apples and lavender, the worn crochet blanket she’d wrap around us during storms, and the faded photos of my mom in her prom dress on the mantel. That house was her heart.
And it had become mine too. It was a gloomy Tuesday, with thick clouds hanging low, when my phone buzzed. It was Paige.
I stared at the screen, surprised. I hadn’t heard from her in months. Apart from a few tense words at Gran’s funeral, we hadn’t talked.
I answered warily. “Hello?”
“Hey,” she said, skipping pleasantries. “I need a favor.
I think Grandma kept some of my papers at her house. They’re important, and I need to get them.”
I frowned, puzzled. “What kind of papers?”
“Just… documents.
Birth stuff, school stuff. I don’t know. Can I come by and grab them?”
I hesitated.
“Can it wait a couple of days? I’ve got a work trip tomorrow. I’ll be back Thursday.”
“No, it can’t wait,” she snapped.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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