Love's Prison

The family group chat exploded the next morning.

Aunt Lauren launched the first salvo: a tear-soaked essay several hundred words long, branding me an “ungrateful child.” She claimed that the moment my father was gone, I’d hounded my mother for money—pushing her to a heart attack. I had turned my back on family for cash, she wrote. A heartless ingrate.

Accompanying the post was a photo of Lisa, pale and tethered to an IV in a hospital bed.

I recognized the routine. The tears, the theatrics—the full performance.

Our relatives in the chat erupted instantly.

“How could Brooklyn turn out like this? It’s heartbreaking!”

“Exactly! After everything her mother suffered!”

“All that education, wasted.”

My cousin Harold—Lauren’s son—tagged me directly. “Brooklyn, are you even human? Apologize to your mom right now, or I swear I’ll never acknowledge you as family again.”

Scrolling through the flood of accusations, I felt my hands and feet go cold.

These were my relatives.

Without asking for my side, without a shred of proof, they tried and convicted me based solely on Lauren’s story.

I didn’t defend myself in the chat. What was the point? They’d believe whatever they wanted.

I left the group. Silence fell.

But the trouble was only beginning.

To save for tuition, I’d been hauling bricks part-time at a nearby construction site. The work was brutal, but it paid a hundred and fifty a day.

When I showed up that morning, the foreman told me I was fired.

“Look, kid, it’s not that I don’t want to help you,” he said, shifting uncomfortably. “But your family came by. Said you’ve got sticky fingers. This place is too small for someone like you.”

I understood immediately. Lisa and Lauren. They weren’t just isolating me—they were cutting off my livelihood. **They were determined to leave me with nothing.**

When it rains, it pours.

That night, when I returned to the sunless basement room I’d rented for five years, the landlady was waiting at the door.

“Brooklyn, I’m so sorry. My son’s getting married—we need the room for the newlyweds. You’ll… have to move out. Soon.”

She couldn’t meet my eyes.

Her son was overseas. There was no sudden wedding.

I understood everything.

“Auntie,” I asked quietly, “did my mother come to see you?”

She sighed, her silence confirmation enough. “She said if you stayed, she’d make a scene every day. I… I don’t have a choice.”

**They were really trying to destroy me.**