As my relatives argued over Grandma’s inheritance, I brought home her cherished dog and discovered the hidden truth she meant only for me.

The day Grandma Cassandra died, the world fell into a strange, unsettling quiet—a silence that felt wrong, as if the very air knew an irreplaceable anchor had been lost. She had been the steady voice holding together a fractured family for decades, a matriarch whom everyone desperately needed, though they only fully realized it too late.

Meredith stood beside the …