The call came just as I was sliding the last cardboard box into the closet of my newly purchased cottage, the kind of small, sunlit place people buy when they finally decide they’ve spent enough years living for everyone else. It sat in a quiet valley outside town, framed by pines and a thin ribbon of road that felt like a boundary between my old life and the rest I had promised myself. The cottage still smelled like fresh paint and new wood, my dishes were still wrapped in paper, and the sofa cushions hadn’t yet learned the shape of my body. I was standing in the kitchen with the kettle in my hand, ready to make tea and enjoy the first real silence I’d had in years, when my phone rang. It was Laura, my daughter-in-law, bright and cheerful in that way people are when they’re about to place a burden somewhere else. She didn’t ask how I was settling in. She didn’t ask if it was a good time. She announced it like a weather report: they were arriving in two hours, bringing twenty family members, and they’d be staying for two weeks.
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