What Bobby Left Behind

No one from my family came to my husband Bobby’s memorial service. Not my parents, who lived forty-five minutes away in Wauwatosa and had no scheduling conflicts I knew of. Not my younger sister Rachel, who’d posted on Instagram that morning about her “perfect day” with a photo of mimosas and white roses. Not even Stephanie—my best friend since third grade, the person who once knew every thought I never said out loud, who’d been there for my first heartbreak and my college graduation and my wedding day.

They chose my sister’s engagement celebration instead. All of them. Together. Like they’d coordinated their absence, like they’d collectively decided that Rachel’s party—her third engagement party, actually, because her fiancé’s family had already thrown two—was more important than saying goodbye to the man I’d loved for eight years and been married to for five.

And just as the chapel doors closed behind the last of Bobby’s colleagues filing out into the November cold, my phone lit up with a message from my mother that made my stomach drop: “We need to talk NOW. Call me immediately.” This was followed by a flood of notifications—missed calls, text messages, voicemails stacking up like evidence of something urgent, something that apparently couldn’t wait until after I’d buried my husband. The urgency had nothing to do with grief or comfort or finally showing up for their daughter in her darkest moment. It had everything to do with reaching me before I opened what Bobby had left behind.

My name is Cassandra Mitchell, though I was born Cassandra Hartley, and I’m thirty-two years old—too young to be a widow, too old to still be hoping my family might change. That morning at the quiet cemetery outside Milwaukee, with Lake Michigan wind cutting through my black coat and the November sky pressing down gray and heavy, the empty chairs in the front row—reserved for immediate family, marked with small white ribbons—felt louder than any of the words being spoken by the chaplain who’d never met Bobby but was doing his best to honor a life he’d only learned about from the notes I’d provided.

Bobby’s colleagues arrived early, standing together in their dress uniforms, shoes polished to mirror brightness, posture military-straight even though Bobby had been a firefighter, not a soldier. The discipline was the same. The brotherhood was the same. These men and women who’d worked alongside my husband, who’d trusted him with their lives and who he’d trusted with his, who’d been there in the hospital during those final awful days—they showed up. Small American flags lined the path from the chapel to the gravesite, planted in the frozen ground by the cemetery staff, and they shifted gently in the wind with a sound like whispered goodbyes that made it hard to swallow past the lump in my throat.

I kept glancing back toward the chapel entrance, a motion I couldn’t stop even though I knew it was pointless, even though I’d already accepted the truth. Some small, desperate part of me kept expecting to see my mother’s familiar silhouette, my father’s measured walk, Stephanie’s apologetic smile as she rushed in late with an explanation that would somehow make sense of why she’d missed the first half of the service.

No mom. No dad. No Stephanie. No Rachel, though I hadn’t really expected her—everything had always been about Rachel, why would today be different?

They were all at my sister’s celebration instead. I knew this not because they’d had the courtesy to tell me, not because they’d called to explain why they couldn’t possibly be in two places at once and had made the difficult choice to prioritize an engagement party over a funeral. I’d learned about it the way I learned most things about my family these days—through social media, through the carefully curated performances they posted for public consumption.

The night before Bobby’s service, unable to sleep in the bed that still smelled like him, I’d made the mistake of opening Instagram. And there it was: Rachel’s engagement celebration in full swing. White decorations draped across my parents’ backyard, the pergola strung with lights even though it was only 2 PM. Raised glasses catching the afternoon sun. Rachel’s ring—a massive princess cut that her fiancé Trevor had probably gone into debt to afford—held up to the camera, catching light, demanding attention. And in the background, clearly visible in multiple photos, my mother’s smile. Not the tight, strained smile she wore when she was stressed or uncomfortable, but her real smile, the one that meant she was genuinely happy, genuinely present in the moment.

As if loss were something you could reschedule around. As if grief were negotiable. As if saying “we’ll celebrate you later, honey, after we get through this party” was a reasonable thing to say to your daughter who’d just lost her husband at thirty-two.

Bobby would have noticed that. He’d always been observant in ways my family never appreciated, seeing patterns and truths that they preferred to keep buried beneath layers of pleasant pretense. He used to say, in that gentle way he had that never felt like criticism even when it was, that my family cared more about appearances than presence. More about how things looked from the outside than how they felt on the inside. More about maintaining the narrative of the perfect Hartley family than actually being there for each other when it mattered.

I’d always defended them. Made excuses. Explained away their absences and their priorities and their tendency to minimize anything that didn’t fit their preferred story. But standing in that cemetery, looking at those empty chairs, I couldn’t find any more excuses.

Bobby had worked a public-service job that brought him home tired but steady—twenty-four-hour shifts at the firehouse, the kind of schedule that meant some birthdays and holidays got celebrated late or early or sometimes not at all, but when he was home he was fully home, fully present. I worked long hospital shifts as an ICU nurse, twelve-hour rotations that left me exhausted and sometimes traumatized by the things I saw. Our small house in Bay View—a 1920s bungalow that needed more work than we could afford but that we loved anyway—always felt grounded simply because we shared it. We made it work. We built something real.

This past year had taught me something simple and difficult, something I’d resisted learning for most of my adult life: many people promise support, but mean it only when it fits their plans. When it’s convenient. When it doesn’t require them to sacrifice anything that matters to them.

Bobby’s coworkers came to the service. All of them, the entire A-shift, even though some of them had worked overnight and should have been home sleeping. Our neighbors came—Mrs. Chen from next door who’d brought us soup twice a week during Bobby’s illness, the Kowalskis from across the street who’d mowed our lawn all summer without being asked. My colleagues from the hospital came, fellow nurses who understood exactly what I was going through because many of them had lost people too, who knew that showing up mattered more than saying the right words.

My parents sent carefully worded text messages. “Thinking of you today.” “Wishing we could be there.” “Know that we love you.” Words that cost nothing and meant less.

Stephanie had offered comfort at first, in those early days after Bobby’s diagnosis when we’d still believed the treatment might work, when hope was still something we could hold onto. But as the months wore on and Bobby got sicker and the reality became unavoidable, Stephanie’s presence had drifted away. Her texts came less frequently. Her explanations grew more elaborate. She was busy with work. She was dealing with her own stuff. She wasn’t good with hospitals and sickness, it triggered her anxiety, surely I understood.

And then, two weeks before Bobby died, she’d called to tell me about Rachel’s engagement. About the party being planned. About how Mom and Dad were so excited, how everyone was coming, how it was going to be this beautiful celebration of new beginnings. She’d talked for fifteen minutes about flower arrangements and caterers before asking, almost as an afterthought, how Bobby was doing.

“He’s dying,” I’d said flatly, too exhausted to soften it. “The doctors say maybe two weeks. Maybe less.”

Silence on her end. Then: “Oh, Cass, I’m so sorry. That’s awful. Do you need anything?”

“I need my family to remember I exist,” I’d said, and hung up before she could respond.

So when the chaplain paused one last time during the service, looking toward the empty front row as if waiting for someone else to arrive, as if surely there would be family for this young widow, I understood with absolute clarity that no one was coming. This was it. This was all I got.

At the graveside, after the flag had been folded with military precision and handed to me with words I’d remember forever even though I couldn’t hear them clearly through the roaring in my ears, after Bobby’s captain had spoken briefly about service and sacrifice and brotherhood, after the final salute and the final goodbye, my phone vibrated in my coat pocket with the insistence of something that would not be ignored.

I pulled it out with numb fingers. My mother’s message flashed on the lock screen, the preview showing only the first line: “We need to talk NOW. Call me immediately. This is important. Cassandra, I mean it, call me right—”

The missed calls were stacking up in real time—14, 22, 28, 31—numbers climbing like a countdown to something I didn’t understand yet but instinctively feared.

I felt something inside me steady and harden, like metal cooling into its final shape.

If she wanted to comfort me, she would have been here. If any of them had cared about my grief, my loss, my devastation at losing the man I loved, they would have been in those empty chairs. But they weren’t. And their sudden desperate urgency to reach me now, after the service was over, after I’d gotten through the hardest day of my life without them—that told me everything I needed to know about what this was actually about.

After the final words were spoken and people began drifting away in that uncertain way mourners do, not wanting to leave you alone but not knowing how to stay, one of Bobby’s colleagues—Lieutenant Marcus Webb, a twenty-year veteran who’d mentored Bobby when he first joined the department—stepped forward and placed an envelope into my hand.

It was a standard business envelope, cream-colored, sealed with the kind of care that suggested the contents mattered. My name was written across the front in Bobby’s familiar handwriting, the script I’d seen on grocery lists and birthday cards and the note he’d left on the bathroom mirror the morning of our first anniversary: “Five more years? A hundred more? However many I get with you won’t be enough.”

“He asked me to give this to you afterward,” Marcus said softly, his voice rough with the emotion he’d been holding back during the service. “Just you. He was very specific about that. After the service, when you were alone. He made me promise.”

My chest tightened. My fingers closed around the envelope, feeling the firm edge of something inside—not just paper, but something else. A card? A key? I couldn’t tell through the envelope but I knew it was important, knew Bobby had planned this, had thought about what I would need after he was gone.

And suddenly the messages on my phone didn’t feel like concern or love or family finally remembering I existed.

They felt urgent in a different way. Predatory. Like someone trying to reach me before I learned something they didn’t want me to know.

I looked up from the envelope, scanning the cemetery grounds with new awareness. And that’s when I saw it—a familiar vehicle idling near the edge of the parking lot, half-hidden behind a row of trees, positioned as if the driver was unsure whether to leave or stay, whether to make their presence known.

My mother’s silver Lexus. Distinctive because of the custom plates: HARTLEY1.

Through the windshield, even at this distance, I could make out figures. My sister Rachel in the passenger seat, wearing what looked like a light-colored dress—probably the same dress from the engagement party photos. And in the back seat, Stephanie’s profile, her distinctive auburn hair catching the gray November light.

They were here. They’d been here the whole time. But they hadn’t come to the service. Hadn’t sat in those empty chairs. Hadn’t stood at the graveside or offered me their hands or their presence.

They’d come because they knew about the envelope. They were waiting to intercept me, to get to me before I opened whatever Bobby had left behind, to control the narrative or the information or whatever it was they thought they needed to protect.

How did they know? How could they possibly know what Bobby had arranged with Marcus unless—

Unless Bobby had told them. Or told someone who told them. Unless this envelope and whatever it contained was something they already knew about and feared.

I slipped it into my coat pocket, felt the weight of it settle against my hip, solid and real and mine. Then I pulled out my phone and opened the voicemail screen. Thirty-seven missed calls now. Multiple voicemails.

I selected the most recent one, from twelve minutes ago, and pressed play.

My mother’s voice filled my ear, high and tight with barely controlled panic:

“Cassandra, you need to call me back immediately. Before you do anything else. Before you open anything or make any decisions. There are things you don’t understand, things Bobby didn’t understand, and if you’ll just call me back we can explain everything. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t sign anything. Don’t—”

The voicemail cut off as she ran out of time.

I deleted it without listening to the others. Whatever story they wanted to tell me, whatever explanation they’d crafted, I didn’t want to hear it filtered through their panic and their need to control. I wanted the truth. Bobby’s truth.

I started walking toward the parking lot, toward my own car—the ten-year-old Honda that Bobby had kept running with careful maintenance and YouTube tutorials, the car that still had his coffee mug in the cup holder and his favorite playlist queued up on the stereo.

And that’s when I heard my mother’s voice behind me, not on the phone this time but in person, sharp and insistent, carrying across the frozen ground:

“Cassandra! Stop right there! We need to talk to you!”

I didn’t stop. I kept walking, my hand pressed against the envelope in my pocket, protecting it, claiming it, refusing to let them take this last thing Bobby had left me.

“Cassandra Marie Hartley, I am talking to you!” My mother’s heels clicked rapidly on the pavement as she hurried after me, her voice rising in that particular way that meant she expected obedience, that she believed using my full name still granted her some kind of authority over me.

I wasn’t Hartley anymore. I was Mitchell. I’d chosen Bobby’s name with relief and joy, claimed it as my own, built a life under it that had nothing to do with the family I’d been born into.

I reached my car and unlocked it, slid into the driver’s seat. Through the window I could see them approaching—my mother, my sister, Stephanie trailing slightly behind looking uncomfortable but not uncomfortable enough to refuse to participate in whatever this was.

My mother reached the car and pulled on the locked passenger door handle. When it didn’t open, she knocked on the window, hard enough that I worried briefly about the glass.

“Open this door right now! We drove all the way here to talk to you and you’re going to listen!”

I started the engine. Rolled down the window just two inches, enough to speak through but not enough for her to reach in.

“You didn’t come to say goodbye to Bobby,” I said, my voice steady in a way that surprised me, calm despite the rage building in my chest like a wave. “You came to intercept something you think I shouldn’t have. Which means Bobby was right about you. About all of you.”

“You don’t understand—” Rachel started.

“Then explain it,” I said. “Explain why my husband’s memorial service was less important than your third engagement party. Explain why none of you could be bothered to sit in those empty chairs but you could drive out here afterward to ambush me in a parking lot. Explain why you’re so desperate to reach me before I read whatever Bobby left me that you’ve called thirty-seven times in less than an hour.”

Stephanie finally spoke, her voice carrying guilt and defensiveness in equal measure. “Cass, we didn’t know the service was today. Your mom said it was next week, that you’d changed the date—”

“I sent you all the information three weeks ago. Email, text, and a physical invitation because I know Dad doesn’t check his email regularly. You knew. You all knew. You just didn’t care enough to come.”

“That’s not fair,” my mother said, her voice shifting into the martyred tone she used when she wanted to be the victim. “We’ve been dealing with Rachel’s engagement, and the party was already planned, and we thought we could make it to both but the timing—”

“Stop.” I cut her off, my hand tightening on the steering wheel. “I don’t want to hear the excuses. I don’t want to hear how you managed to convince yourselves that a party was more important than supporting your daughter through the worst loss of her life. I’m done with the explanations that somehow always make your choices sound reasonable and my hurt sound unreasonable.”

I looked at the envelope in my passenger seat, Bobby’s handwriting clear even in the dimming afternoon light.

“Whatever is in here,” I said, gesturing to it, “Bobby wanted me to have. Just me. After the service. Those were his instructions. And I’m going to honor them because he was the only person in my life who actually showed up when it mattered.”

“Cassandra, please—” My mother’s voice cracked, actual fear bleeding through now. “There are things about Bobby you don’t know. Things he was involved in. Financial things. We were trying to protect you—”

“By lying to me? By manipulating me? By staying away from his memorial service? That’s your idea of protection?”

I shifted the car into reverse, forcing them to step back from the door.

“I’m leaving now. I’m going to go home to the house Bobby and I built together, and I’m going to read whatever he left me, and I’m going to make my own decisions about my own life without your interference or your protection or your explanations.”

“If you open that envelope without talking to us first, you’ll regret it!” Rachel said, her voice rising with the dramatic flair she’d always had. “There are legal implications! Financial implications! You could lose everything!”

I looked at her through the window—my baby sister who I’d protected and defended and made excuses for our entire lives, who’d always been the favored child while I was the responsible one, the good one, the one who didn’t cause problems and therefore didn’t require attention.

“I already lost everything,” I said quietly. “I lost Bobby. Nothing in that envelope can be worse than that.”

I rolled up the window, backed out of the parking space, and drove away. In my rearview mirror I could see them standing in the parking lot, my mother with her phone already to her ear calling someone, Rachel gesturing angrily, Stephanie looking lost and uncertain.

I drove home through streets that looked surreal in the afternoon light, everything too normal, too ordinary, the world continuing on as if Bobby’s death had changed nothing at all when it had changed absolutely everything.

At home, I deadbolted the front door, turned off my phone, and sat at the kitchen table—the same table where Bobby and I had eaten a thousand meals, played cards, planned our future that we’d never get to have.

I opened the envelope carefully, my hands shaking slightly despite my earlier bravado.

Inside was a letter, several pages folded together. And a USB drive. And a business card for an attorney I didn’t recognize—Patricia Chen, Estate Planning and Probate.

I read Bobby’s letter first:

My Cassie,

If you’re reading this, I’m gone, and I’m so sorry. Sorry to leave you. Sorry for all the time we won’t get. Sorry that I can’t be there to hold your hand through what comes next.

But I need you to know some things. Things I discovered about six months ago, right after I got the diagnosis. Things I wanted to tell you immediately but that my lawyer advised me to document first, to protect you, to make sure you’d be okay even if your family tried to interfere.

The USB drive contains copies of documents, recordings, and evidence that your family has been systematically stealing from you for the past eight years. Since we got married, actually. I’m sorry. I know how that sounds. I know you won’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to believe it either when I first figured it out.

My hands were shaking harder now. I kept reading.

It started when your grandmother died and left you that inheritance—$275,000 that was supposed to go to you directly. Your parents convinced you to let them “manage” it for you, remember? They said they’d invest it wisely, that it would grow, that you’d have access to it whenever you needed it.

You never saw a penny of it. They spent it. On Rachel’s college tuition. On their kitchen remodel. On the family vacation to Europe. I have the bank statements, the receipts, everything.

Then there were the life insurance policies. The ones in both our names that you thought we were both paying into. You were paying your half. They were cashing out mine. Again, documentation is on the drive.

And the car accident three years ago—the one where someone hit you and your insurance company said they’d settled? They paid out $45,000. Your mother handled the paperwork because you were still recovering. You never saw that money either.

It goes on. Eight years of financial abuse, manipulation, theft. All carefully hidden, all presented as them “helping” you or “managing things” while you focused on work and our life together.

I confronted them. That’s on the drive too—a recording from two months ago when I told them I knew what they’d been doing and they needed to make it right. They laughed at me, Cassie. Said I was nobody, that I was a blue-collar firefighter who didn’t understand how families with money operated. Said you’d never believe me over them. Said if I told you, they’d make sure you knew I was lying.

Then they made threats. Subtle ones. About accidents. About how dangerous my job was. About how tragic it would be if something happened to me.

I don’t think they caused the cancer. I don’t think they’re that evil. But I do think they hoped I’d die before I could tell you the truth. I think that’s why your mother was so insistent on handling all the medical paperwork, on being your “support system” during my illness—she was monitoring what information you had access to, making sure I didn’t tell you about any of this.

The lawyer I’ve retained for you—Patricia Chen, her card is in this envelope—she has copies of everything. She’s prepared to help you recover what can be recovered and protect you from further manipulation.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you while I was alive. I wanted to fight this battle for you, not burden you with it while you were already watching me die. But I realize now that was a mistake. You’re the strongest person I know, Cassie. You don’t need protection. You need the truth.

Whatever comes next, know that I love you. Know that our life together was the best thing that ever happened to me. And know that you deserve so much better than a family that sees you as an ATM instead of a daughter.

Fight for yourself, love. Stop making excuses for them. See them clearly and respond accordingly.

Yours forever, Bobby

I sat there in my kitchen, in the house Bobby and I had made our home, and read the letter three times before the words really penetrated. Before I could process what he was telling me. What my family had been doing.

Then I plugged the USB drive into my laptop.

Bank statements going back eight years, with my grandmother’s inheritance clearly deposited into an account in my name and then systematically drained through transfers to my parents’ accounts. Receipts for Rachel’s tuition payments coming from “Cassandra’s education fund.” Documentation of the car insurance settlement with my mother’s signature on the receipt, the money deposited into her account. Life insurance documents showing policies I thought were active had been cancelled, cash values extracted.

And recordings. Bobby, confronting my parents in what sounded like their living room, laying out what he’d discovered, giving them a chance to make it right.

My mother’s voice, cold and dismissive: “You’re embarrassing yourself, Bobby. Cassandra trusts us to manage her finances because she’s too busy saving lives to worry about money. What we do with her money is between us and her, not you.”

Bobby: “You stole from her. You stole her inheritance. You’ve been stealing from her for years.”

My father: “We’ve been protecting her from her own financial naivety. She would have squandered that inheritance. We’ve been prudent stewards.”

Bobby: “You spent it on a kitchen remodel. That’s not stewardship.”

My mother, her voice turning sharp: “You need to be very careful about what accusations you make, Bobby. You’re a civil servant. You have a dangerous job. Accidents happen. And if something happened to you, well, Cassandra would need her family more than ever. It would be a shame if your unfounded accusations alienated her from the people who truly care about her welfare.”

Listening to them threaten my husband—my dying husband—I felt something in me break and reform harder, colder, clearer than before.

I called Patricia Chen. She answered on the second ring despite it being after five on a Friday.

“Mrs. Mitchell? I’ve been expecting your call. Bobby said you’d reach out after the service. I’m so sorry for your loss. He was a good man.”

“Tell me what we need to do,” I said, my voice steady and cold and nothing like the grief-destroyed woman I’d been that morning. “Tell me how we make them pay.”

We talked for an hour. She explained what could be recovered through civil litigation, what had passed the statute of limitations, what evidence was strongest. She explained that Bobby had already filed initial paperwork, that he’d been building a case before he died, that everything was ready to go—I just had to decide if I wanted to proceed.

“He was very clear about one thing,” Patricia said. “He didn’t want you to feel obligated to pursue this if reconciliation with your family was more important to you. He said the choice had to be yours. But he wanted you to have all the information to make an informed choice.”

I thought about those empty chairs. About my family choosing Rachel’s party over Bobby’s memorial. About my mother’s desperate calls not to comfort me but to stop me from learning the truth. About eight years of financial abuse disguised as family helping family.

“File everything,” I said. “Pursue every avenue of recovery. I want them to face consequences. I want them to understand that I see them clearly now, and I’m done being their convenient victim.”

“Understood. I’ll have initial paperwork ready by Monday. This will get ugly, you should prepare for that. Families don’t like being held accountable.”

“Let it get ugly. Bobby’s gone. I have nothing left to protect except my own dignity.”

The lawsuit I filed the following week made the local news—not because the amounts were huge in the grand scheme of things, but because family financial abuse cases were relatively rare and the details were shocking enough to generate public interest. Daughter sues parents and sister for theft of inheritance and systematic financial exploitation over eight years. Local firefighter’s widow seeks justice.

My phone exploded with calls and messages that I ignored. My mother left voicemails that ranged from tearful apologies to threats to accusations that I was mentally unstable from grief. Rachel posted on social media about “ungrateful siblings who bite the hands that feed them.” Stephanie sent a long text about how disappointed she was that I was “choosing money over family.”

I blocked all of them.

The legal process took fourteen months. Discovery revealed even more than Bobby had found—nearly $400,000 total, stolen and spent over eight years. Some of it we could recover. Some of it was gone forever. But the judge was unsympathetic to my family’s defense that they’d been “helping” me, particularly after hearing Bobby’s recordings of their threats.

In the end, I recovered about $240,000 through settlements and enforced repayment plans. My parents had to sell their house to pay me back. Rachel’s engagement fell apart when Trevor learned about the lawsuit and realized the lavish wedding they’d been planning was being funded with stolen money. Stephanie never reached out again.

I used part of the recovered money to establish a foundation in Bobby’s name, providing financial assistance to families of firefighters dealing with medical crises. The rest I invested carefully, working with a financial advisor who wasn’t related to me and had no reason to steal.

And I moved forward. Not moved on—you don’t move on from losing the person you love—but forward. Building a life that honored what Bobby and I had created together while acknowledging that he was gone.

Three years later, I’m still in Milwaukee, still working as an ICU nurse, still living in our little bungalow that I’ve slowly renovated into something that feels like mine rather than ours. I’ve built a chosen family of friends and colleagues and neighbors who actually show up when it matters.

I haven’t spoken to my parents or Rachel since the lawsuit settled. Stephanie sent a wedding invitation last year that I threw away without opening. That part of my life is simply over, severed as cleanly as Bobby cut through their lies with his careful documentation and his final gift of truth.

Sometimes I think about that moment in the cemetery, my mother calling my name, expecting me to stop and obey and let her control the narrative one more time. And I think about how close I came to doing exactly that, to letting her explain it all away, to accepting some watered-down version of events that would have let them keep stealing from me while I went on making excuses.

Bobby saved me from that. His final act of love wasn’t just revealing the truth—it was trusting me to be strong enough to handle it, to fight back, to choose my own dignity over the comfortable lie of family that had never really existed.

The empty chairs at his memorial service weren’t a tragedy. They were a gift. They showed me exactly who my family was when it mattered most, when the choice was between showing up for me or protecting their own interests.

And they chose themselves. Just like they’d been choosing themselves for eight years while pretending to help me.

I choose differently now. I choose truth over comfortable lies. I choose people who show up over people who send carefully worded text messages. I choose to honor Bobby’s memory by living with the kind of integrity he modeled, even when it cost him everything.

The envelope he left me contained more than just evidence and accusations. It contained permission—permission to stop making excuses, permission to see clearly, permission to fight for myself instead of always protecting the people who hurt me.

Thank you, Bobby. For loving me enough to tell me the truth. For fighting for me even while you were dying. For trusting me to be strong enough to handle what you’d discovered.

I was strong enough. I am strong enough.

And I’ll never let anyone make me small again.

THE END