On Christmas Eve, I woke up to an empty house! My whole family secretly left to a luxury vacation…
I looked at him, really looked, and shook my head. «No. If they want answers, they can try paying for their own groceries for once.»
He gave me a dry smile. «Fair enough.»
I thought that would be the end of it, but they weren’t done. Two days after the police visit, my parents showed up at my job.
I work a standard office job, fintech, customer support, mostly spreadsheets and small talk. It’s the last place you expect to be ambushed by your mother.
But there they were. I got a message from reception. «Your parents are here. Is everything okay?»
I stepped into the lobby and saw them. My dad in his usual pressed polo, my mom in her winter coat and that tight look she gets when she’s trying not to cry or scream. They looked like they’d aged five years in five days.
«Can we talk?» she said.
I didn’t answer. My dad stepped forward. «You’re seriously doing all this over a prank?»
That was the first thing out of his mouth. Not, «Are you okay?» Not, «We’re sorry.» Just, «You’re being ridiculous.»
I didn’t say anything.
«You need to come home,» my mom said. «This has gone too far. We need to fix this. You need help, and this is still your house too. You can’t just run away.»
That’s when I spoke. «You left me first,» I said. «Remember?»
She opened her mouth, closed it. My dad tried again, voice rising, something about bills and responsibility and maturity.
«If you don’t leave,» I said quietly, «I’ll call security.»
They stood there for a beat longer. My mom looked stunned. My dad looked furious. But they left. Not quietly. Not gracefully. But they left.
That night, I sat on the tiny balcony of the new apartment with a cup of tea and a blanket around my shoulders. The air was cold, but I didn’t mind.
My phone buzzed on the table beside me. Another message. Another voicemail. I didn’t look.
For the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel like I was bracing for something. I wasn’t waiting for someone to yell my name or ask where the Wi-Fi password went or demand to know who was covering the gas bill. I just sat there. Letting the silence stay mine for once.
A couple of weeks went by. I didn’t hear much from them directly. They’d finally stopped calling. Or maybe they figured out I wasn’t going to pick up. Either way, the silence was nice.
I filled it with small things—grocery runs, quiet dinners, a new job routine that didn’t involve being the default handyman or emotional punching bag. But the silence didn’t mean they were done.
I got my updates from other people. The neighbor. My cousin. Once, even someone from my mom’s church group sent me a very long, very uninvited message that began with, «You don’t know how hard this has been on your parents.»
Apparently, things were falling apart back at the house. The Wi-Fi had finally gone out when the temporary modem ran out of prepaid data. My sister blamed my younger brother for not replacing it. He blamed her for changing the streaming passwords and locking him out of her Netflix profile.
The electricity bill had gone unpaid for over a month, and someone had to borrow money to stop the shutoff. The fridge? Replaced. With a cheap secondhand one that made a constant humming noise. My cousin described it as «sad.» Which I didn’t ask her to do. But thanks.
No one seemed to know who was responsible for what anymore. The way I heard it? Every time someone opened their mouth, it turned into a fight. The group chat they used to exclude me? Dead. No one replied to anything anymore.
That probably would have been enough for me: to know it was crumbling. That the house I held up for years with quiet labor and automatic payments was finally too heavy for the rest of them to carry.
I was complaining about someone microwaving fish in the office break room again. That’s when the buzzer rang. I assumed it was delivery. I’d ordered dish soap and new sheets.
I almost didn’t check. But something told me to look through the security camera feed first. And there they were. All three of them.
My sister. My younger brother. My older brother. Standing outside the apartment building like it was a sitcom reunion. My sister even had a little bag of snacks in one hand, like she thought this was some kind of olive branch.
To this day, I still don’t know how they got my address. Certainly not from me. But I imagine it took some effort. Funny what people can pull together when they’re motivated by the right kind of panic.
I didn’t buzz them in right away. I stood at the door for a long moment, then opened it myself and walked down.
«Hey,» my sister said, all sunshine and casual charm, like we hadn’t spent Christmas in two different dimensions. «We were in the area and thought, why not stop by?»
Sure. Just happened to be in the neighborhood. Of a building you weren’t supposed to know I lived in.
I didn’t say anything.
«We’ve been talking,» my older brother said. «We wanted to, you know, clear the air, make things right.»
«We miss you,» my younger brother added, trying for sincerity and landing somewhere closer to high school group project energy.
They asked if they could come up. I didn’t want them in my space, but I also wanted to hear what they were trying to sell. So I let them in.
We sat in the living room. They offered me chips from the bag. I declined.
They started slow, laughing about past pranks, playing it off like, «We didn’t realize how much it hurt you,» and, «We didn’t mean anything by it.» I didn’t interrupt.
They said they missed me, that it hadn’t been the same without me.
«We even started doing game nights again,» my sister said brightly, «like when we were kids. You should come.»
That’s when I started to get the itch, the warning bell, because we didn’t have game nights as kids. Not really. That was a thing I tried to start once when I was 15 and lonely. They mocked me for it, but here they were selling nostalgia they didn’t actually own.
And then came the slip. My older brother, reaching for his water, said casually, «And I mean, honestly, if you moved back, it would just help stabilize things, you know? Financially.»
There it was. The truth. The reason they’d track down my address. The reason they were sitting on my borrowed couch trying to smile like nothing happened.
It wasn’t about family. It wasn’t about missing me. It was about money. About losing the person who made the mortgage payments quietly, who paid the Wi-Fi bill, the groceries, the streaming services, the washer, the dryer, the fridge, the background noise of their lives they never thought to question.
I stood up. «You need to leave,» I said.
My sister blinked. «What?»
«You can finish your chips in the hallway, but you’re leaving.»
My younger brother looked at me like I’d slapped him. «But we’re trying,» he started.
«No,» I said. «You’re trying to put things back the way they were. That’s not the same.»
They left. Not yelling this time. Not storming. Just awkward, confused, brittle silence. Like they hadn’t prepared for that answer. Like they still thought I’d cave.
Weeks passed. Eventually, I heard the rest through my cousin. Again.
After that visit, things got worse. Everyone started blaming each other. My younger brother said it was my sister’s idea to leave me behind in the first place. She said it was my older brother. He swore it was just «group energy.»
They stopped speaking altogether. One by one, they moved out. My sister moved in with a friend. My younger brother went to stay with a classmate. My older brother couch-hopped for a while, then ended up in a rented room an hour outside the city.
