when family abandons you

Chloe

Relief crashed through me so violently that my knees nearly buckled. A place to sleep. A door that would open. Family. The word itself felt foreign after three days of freezing in exile, but I clung to it like a drowning woman to a jagged piece of driftwood.

“On my way,” I said before heading up and immediately started walking toward the nearest bus route that would take me up to the residential hills where the Sterling estate stood.

For the first time since the rain had washed the last of my wedding night from my skin, something like hope flickered in my chest. I told myself the call meant safety. I told myself blood still meant something. I told myself that even if the rest of the world had turned its back, the house I had grown up in… the people who shared my DNA… would not.

I did not yet know that the gates would open only long enough to trap me inside... and that the people waiting on the other side had already decided I was a threat that needed to be surgically removed.

When the massive iron estate gates swung open, a sob of pure gratitude caught in my throat. I had honestly thought Julian’s people might have locked it down. Three days ago, battered and bleeding from Julian’s psychological warfare, I had crawled to these very gates begging for shelter, only for Vanessa to cast me out into the storm. Saying it  was my fault that Julian’s men came to lock down the building. But today was different. Uncle Lucas  had called me. They were letting me in. Which means the house haven’t been locked down.

“Uncle!”

The word ripped from my lips before I could stop it, raw and desperate.

Lucas Sterling stood in the centre of the grand living room, looking immaculate in an expensive tailored suit. His expression was a wall of ice. He wasn’t alone. Beside him stood his daughter, Vanessa, wearing a smug, toxic smile, and his wife, Brenda, who looked at me as if I were dirt tracked onto her expensive rugs. And on the left couch sat my two younger uncles.

Grandpa had four children. Uncle Lucas was the eldest. My mother was the second child— and the only female among them. Then came Uncle Marcus, the third child, who worked the overseas shipping docks and was hardly ever home. Finally, Uncle Hugh, who assisted with the local shipping docks, his face perpetually exhausted from the demanding requirements of his job.

For one foolish, agonizing moment, I thought they were happy to see me.

I thought Lucas had called me home because the gravity of what had happened three days ago had finally hit him. I thought he regretted letting Vanessa throw me to the wolves.

I thought I could finally stop running. I greeted them all, my hands clasped tightly over my chest to stop my heart from hammering out of my ribs.

“Uncle, I came as soon as I could,” I whispered, my voice trembling violently.

Lucas’s face didn't soften. It hardened into concrete.

“Don’t call me that.”

The air left my lungs. I froze. “What?”

“I said, don’t call me Uncle.”

A suffocating, horrific silence fell over the room. The grand chandelier overhead suddenly felt like a guillotine. I stared at him, my eyes wide, waiting for him to laugh, waiting for him to tell me it was a cruel joke, a test, anything but reality.

He didn’t blink.

“Uncle Lucas,” I whispered, the room spinning around me as I struggled to process the coldness in his eyes. “What’s going on?”

He didn't look at me as an uncle looks at his grieving niece. He casually adjusted his diamond cuff links before raising his gaze, his eyes entirely dead to my suffering.

“What he’s trying to say is that you are no longer needed in this family,” Uncle Marcus interjected from the couch. His voice was utterly detached, devoid of a single ounce of familial warmth.

Lucas stepped forward, capping the cruelty. “Three days ago, you came to this estate after running away from the Vance family. My daughter told you to leave, and you should have stayed away.”

My eyes shifted to Vanessa. She crossed her arms, her chest heaving with a delighted, malicious pleasure. She was enjoying this. She was drinking in my destruction.

“Daddy, you don’t have to explain anything to her,” Vanessa scoffed, tossing her hair. “She should be grateful we haven’t called the police on her for trespassing.”

Police? Trespassing. In my grandfather’s house.  “Wasn’t it uncle Lucas who called me to come home? How could I be arrested for trespassing?”

“What evidence do you have that my dad asked you to come back here?”

 

She was right… I had no evidence. With all that has had this past few days the least I would want now is having issues with my family.

“Vanessa, please,” I sobbed, the tears finally breaking through, hot and blinding. “I came here because I thought—”

“You thought what?” she shrieked, interrupting me with a venom that made me flinch. “That this was still your home? That you could just come crawling back here whenever your pathetic little marriage failed?”

Her sharp, mocking laughter cut through my chest like a physical blade.

I turned back to uncle Lucas, entirely desperate, silently screaming for him to intervene. This was my mother’s brother. The man who had sat beside my grandfather at every Christmas dinner, the man who had watched me take my first steps, the man who had promised my mother on her deathbed that he would always protect me. Even after Grandpa died, I had fiercely believed that somewhere beneath the Sterling ambition, there was still a shred of humanity left in this family. There was still someone who cared about me.

“Please,” I choked out, taking a frantic step toward him, throwing my pride into the dirt. “I have nowhere else to go. Julian took everything. My accounts are completely frozen. The company is gone. I don’t even know how I’m supposed to buy food tomorrow. I don't know how I'm supposed to survive!”

My voice broke completely on the word survive, degenerating into a ragged, pathetic gasp. “I thought you called me because you wanted to help me.”

Lucas’s expression didn't even twitch. There was no pity. There was only disgust.

“I called you because there is something you need to understand.” He reached down, picking up a heavy legal document from the mahogany table, and held it out to me like a death sentence. “Your grandfather is dead. Whatever bond existed between our families died in the dirt with him. From today onward, you and I are no longer related by blood in any meaningful sense. I want absolutely nothing to do with you, and you will no longer present yourself as a member of this family.”

I stared at the paper. The black ink blurred into a horrific smudge before my eyes.

“No longer related by blood?” My lips trembled so violently I could barely form the syllables. “Uncle... how can you say that? My mother was your sister! Her blood is in my veins!”

“Your mother made her choices,” Lucas replied, his voice terrifyingly calm. “Your grandfather made his. And now, I am making mine.”

“But I’m still your niece!” I screamed, a raw, primal sound of pure agony echoing off the high ceilings.

“Not anymore.”

The words struck harder than any physical blow Julian had ever dealt me. The sheer, brutal finality of it knocked the air from my chest. I stumbled backward, my boots slipping on the polished floor, my head shaking in frantic, terrified denial.

“No. No, you can't do this. You can't just erase me! We are family! You can't un-write blood!”

“Family?” Vanessa scoffed, walking up beside her father, looking down her nose at me. “You lost the right to use that word the second you dragged the Sterling name into total disgrace.”

“I didn't do anything!” I cried, my chest heaving as panic seized my throat. “Julian deceived me! He spent months planning this! He stole my inheritance, he forged my signature, he used me!”

“And yet, you married him,” Lucas countered, his voice a freezing current that shut down my defense. “You signed the documents. You allowed yourself to be manipulated like a fool. Why should the Sterling family suffer, why should our reputation be tarnished, just because you were too stupid to see through him?”

I couldn't breathe. The room was running out of oxygen.

They knew.

They knew exactly what Julian had done to me. They knew he had systematically ruined me, stripped me of my dignity, and cast me out. Yet they stood there, looking at me with cold indifference, acting as though I deserved every single second of the torture.

I had come to this house carrying the very last, fragile piece of hope in my bleeding heart. I had protected it through three days of rain, hunger, and terror. And now, my own flesh and blood were tossing it to the floor and crushing it beneath their expensive shoes.

“Please... Lucas... Uncle Marcus... Uncle Hugh...” I dropped to my knees, the tears streaming down my face in hot, unstoppable rivers. I looked at my younger uncles, begging with my eyes, looking for any sign of the men who used to lift me onto their shoulders when I was a child. “I have no one else. The entire world is hunting me. Even if you hate me... please don't turn your back on me like this. Don't throw me out. Please...”

Uncle Marcus looked away, staring intently at the floor. Uncle Hugh cleared his throat, turning his face toward the window, refusing to meet my desperate, pleading gaze.

They were abandoning me. Completely.

Lucas stepped forward, his shadow falling over my broken form on the floor, his voice delivering the final, crushing blow.

“Leave the estate, Chloe. And do not ever come back.”