I am Maya Collins, 30 years old, a freelance creative living in Brooklyn, New York. That evening, in the cramped kitchen of my studio apartment, I had just placed a single candle on a cheap birthday cake from the corner shop when my phone rang. It was the family attorney, his voice low and emotionless, announcing that it was time to read my parents’ will.
I hadn’t even processed the reality that they were truly gone forever when his next words struck me like a punch to the gut.
My younger sister, Savannah Collins, 27, an ambitious PR director, was to inherit the $750,000 mansion in Westchester along with most of the remaining assets. And me?
I was left with a deteriorating wooden cabin somewhere in Alaska with unclear paperwork and vague coordinates—nothing more than a cruel joke. As I ended the call, Derek Sloan, my 31-year-old fiancé, a sharply dressed banker, sneered at me.
He spat the words “pathetic loser” directly in my face, threw the engagement ring onto the scratched wooden table, and slammed the door behind him.
The impact echoed so loudly that the entire hallway seemed to vibrate with whispers, leaving me standing there, exposed and humiliated. Trembling, I opened the will envelope once more and discovered inside a tarnished key, an aged copy of a land deed bearing my grandfather Elias Mercer’s name in Talkeetna, Alaska, and a thin slip of paper with a brief note from my mother:
You will know why it had to be you. PART ONE: THE INVISIBLE DAUGHTER
I was born into a family that appeared flawless from the outside, but inside there was an invisible barrier that divided us completely.
My father, Richard Collins, was a civil engineer—the embodiment of middle-class America.
Awake before dawn, black coffee with no sugar, morning newspaper in hand, and a conviction that achievement only counted if it could be quantified in numbers—in concrete poured and bridges spanning rivers. My mother, Elaine Mercer Collins, worked as a librarian at the local high school.
She was gentle, patient, with the subtle scent of aged books clinging to the sleeves of her cardigan, but she was also someone who seldom contradicted my father. If he made a decision, she typically remained quiet, sometimes offering a small nod, as if already resigned to the idea that her opinions were never strong enough to shift the direction of our household.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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