My name is Lucian Carter, and at thirty-seven, my life in Seattle is one I built from the ground up, a steel and glass fortress against a past full of pain. But to understand the man I am today, you have to travel back with me to Franklin, Pennsylvania—a place where the sweet, haunting memories of a lost childhood still whisper to me in the rain-slicked nights. Franklin in the 1980s was a Rockwell painting come to life, all tree-lined streets and cozy wooden houses.
Our home was different, an old mansion whose grand walls seemed to hold the echo of my mother, Eleanor’s, laughter.
She was my light. Her smile was a gentle dawn, and her hands were always ready to embrace me, to teach me how to fold the delicate wings of a paper crane, how to find stories in the sunset, and how to believe that this world, however harsh, was still full of wonder.
My most vivid memories are of sitting in our sun-drenched kitchen, the air thick with the aroma of freshly baked cookies, as she spun fairy tales or sang lullabies that still play in the quietest corners of my heart. My father, James Carter, was the founder of Carter Enterprises, a successful and often absent real estate mogul.
But his returns were always marked by small treasures: a toy car, a picture book, or a bone-crushing hug that made me feel like the absolute center of his world.
That world, and that light, was extinguished when I was eight. Breast cancer. The words were a clinical, sterile blade that carved through our lives.
The disease was a cruel thief, stealing my mother from us in the space of a single year.
I can still see her in that sterile hospital bed, her eyes fading but her smile still fighting to reach me. “Lucian,” she whispered, her voice a fragile thread.
“You have to be strong, okay? I’ll always be right here… in your heart.” Those were her last words before she closed her eyes forever.
Her funeral is a watercolor memory, blurred by rain and a grief so profound I felt detached from my own body.
I remember the sound of weeping, the patter of rain on a sea of black umbrellas, and an emptiness so vast it felt like the world had collapsed into a black hole, with me at its center. My father, a man I had only ever seen as a titan of strength, held me so tightly I could feel the tremors running through his body. I didn’t know it then, but it was the last time I would ever truly feel his closeness.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
TAP → NEXT PAGE → 👇
