Grief pushed me into the kitchen long before I understood why. I didn’t set out to become “the girl who baked pies for strangers.” I was just trying to keep my hands busy so my heart wouldn’t split open.
The night everything changed was one of those ice-bitten January nights when the windows weep from the cold. I was sixteen, curled up in bed with earbuds in, pretending homework mattered while my parents laughed at something dumb on TV. Then the smell of smoke cut through my music—sharp, metallic, wrong. The alarm screamed. My dad burst into my room, didn’t say a word, just hauled me by the arm, down the stairs, out into snow that burned my bare feet. He turned back for my mom and my grandpa. None of them came out again.
They said it was an electrical issue in the kitchen. The fire didn’t just take my family. It swallowed everything—photos, savings, the little ceramic horse my mom gave me when I turned ten. I was the only thing left standing in the yard.
A youth shelter found me a dorm-style bed: two bathrooms per floor, a shared kitchen for about twenty of us, quiet hours posted on the wall in faded marker. Warm, safe, clean. My aunt Denise—my mother’s older sister and my only relative—called once to say she had “no room” for me, that my uncle used the spare room as an office and she was “grieving too.” She was alert enough, though, to take half the insurance payout “to help with clothes and therapy.” She bought a wine fridge, a new car, a stack of romance and detective novels, and started showing up to book club in designer hats she called her “grieving wardrobe.” I didn’t fight her. I didn’t fight anything. Numb can look a lot like compliance.