believed in me when literally everyone else had abandoned us.
We got married young—I was nineteen, he was twenty. It was a quiet ceremony at the courthouse, just us and his parents and a couple of friends. Without my parents there. Without any of the traditional wedding elements I’d once imagined as a little girl.
We built a life together over the following years—slowly, imperfectly, but honestly. We had a daughter when I was twenty-three. A beautiful girl with Michael’s eyes and my stubbornness. I waited for my parents to reach out after she was born, thinking surely a grandchild would soften them. A birthday card for their granddaughter. A phone call. Anything that acknowledged our existence.
Nothing ever came. The silence remained absolute.
Fifteen years passed like that. Fifteen years of building a life without them, of holidays without family, of milestones celebrated without grandparents.
