When I was seven, my life shattered in a single night. A car accident took my parents, and suddenly everything I knew was gone. My sister Amelia was twenty-one then, with college, a fiancé, and a future ahead of her. Without hesitation, she signed the papers, packed our grief into boxes, and became my guardian. Amelia raised me without complaint. She worked exhausting jobs, left notes in my lunchbox, and never missed a school event.

I was too young to see the cost—the dreams she gave up, the relationship she lost, and how her world slowly shrank until I was at its center. Years later, after I married and moved out, her constant presence began to feel suffocating. She visited daily,