“No.”
My mother stared at me.
“You’re really going to do this?”
“Yes.”
She whispered something under her breath.
Then she said, “Your grandmother would be ashamed.”
That one landed.
My grandmother.
The woman whose money had helped me buy the cabin.
The woman who had once sat beside me at the kitchen table when I was twenty-two and crying because everyone expected me to solve every family problem.
I remembered what she told me.
Eleanor, kindness without boundaries becomes permission.
I looked at my mother.
“You know what Grandma would say?”
My mother went silent.
“She would ask whether I was happy.”
Nobody moved.
“She would tell me that a home is supposed to be a place where your heart can rest.”
I looked at the cabin.
“And she would probably ask why I was letting eleven people stand at my gate trying to take that rest away.”
