Gemotions

The attic air hung thick with dust motes dancing in the single shaft of sunlight slicing through a crack in the boarded-up window. I knelt, my knees protesting the sudden movement, and reached for a stack of forgotten albums. Mother always kept the past locked away, and I, well, I followed suit, never questioning her narratives.

I flipped open the first album, the brittle pages crackling beneath my fingers. A photograph of Grandma Rose, not the prim, disapproving woman I knew, but a woman with laughter crinkling the corners of her eyes, arm-in-arm with a man who was decidedly *not* Grandpa. My stomach churned, a familiar feeling of disquiet.

My breath hitched. The story was always that they were high school sweethearts, destined from the start. This image, this… truth, threatened the fragile scaffolding of my world, the one Mother had so carefully constructed for me, the one I’d been living within for far too long.