PART I – The Eviction Notice
Her hands shook as she read the eviction notice for the third time. Seventy-eight years old. Five orphans raised alone.
Thirty-five years in this house. And now, three months to leave. In the late-afternoon light of Prescott, Arizona, USA, Grace Whitfield sat in her weathered rocking chair on the worn wooden porch of her small house on Copper Basin Road.
The paper felt heavy in her hands, far heavier than it should have been, weighted with seventy-eight years of memories and thirty-five years of sacrifice. The house wasn’t much to look at anymore. The white paint had faded to a tired gray, peeling in places where Grace could no longer reach to maintain it.
The front steps sagged slightly in the middle from decades of children running up and down them. The screen door squeaked when it opened and snapped shut a little too hard when it closed. But it was hers.
Or had been, until medical bills and property taxes had mounted beyond what her small pension could cover. Grace closed her eyes and let the desert breeze cool her weathered face. She could still hear them, all five of them—the children who had become hers through tragedy and choice.
The laughter that had filled this little house. The tears she had wiped away. The scraped knees she had bandaged.
The nightmares she had soothed in the middle of the night. They were grown now, scattered across the United States, building lives of their own. Grace had never told them about the mounting debts, the way she had skipped meals to pay their school fees, the second mortgage she had taken when her late husband’s pension proved insufficient.
They had their own families now, their own struggles, their own bills. She had always believed they shouldn’t be burdened with hers. “Mrs.
Whitfield.”
The voice startled her from her reverie. Grace looked up to see Virginia Hayes, her neighbor of twenty years, standing at the bottom of the porch steps. Concern was etched into Virginia’s lined face.
“I saw the sheriff’s car here earlier,” Virginia said carefully. “Everything all right?”
Grace forced a smile—the same one she had perfected over decades of making sure the children never saw her worry. “Just fine, Virginia,” she replied.
“Just some paperwork. Nothing to fret about.”
Virginia had known her too long for that. She climbed the steps slowly, her own age showing in the careful way she moved.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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