Trespass

The first rule of grief: Don’t fall for your mother’s husband.

The day my mother died, the world went silent. I was nineteen, emotionally numb, and left alone in a house full of ghosts with Julian, the stoic, older man she’d married. He was a stranger to me, a man twenty years my senior, now tasked with being my protector.

His quiet, steady presence was a comfort I didn’t know how to accept. In the suffocating silence of our shared grief, he began to fill the spaces my mother had left empty. He was supposed to be paternal, a guardian watching over his ward. But the lines of our relationship began to blur with every shared meal, every accidental touch, every stolen glance in the firelight.

What started as comfort twisted into a desperate, unspoken desire. A dangerous secret that crackled in the air between us, threatening to burn everything to the ground.

He was the one man who could put me back together, even if loving him would shatter me into a million pieces. This is not a story of healing. This is a story of how we trespassed.