It was my eighteenth birthday, a day that should have been filled with joy, but the silence in the grand dining room was heavy with the ghost of my foster parents, gone too soon.
Across from me sat Ethan, my foster uncle and the only family I had left, his serious gray eyes holding a warmth I foolishly mistook for something more, until I finally confessed my love for him.
His reaction was swift and brutal; he called me disgusting, shameful, and a burden, his words shattering my heart as he left me to drown in humiliation and pain, only to reappear two years later with a beautiful fiancée.