Dinner at the house always feel loud but safe. Plates clank, laughter bounce off the walls, and every conversation overlap like it’s part of a song. Jaisen sit between his grandma and his “sister,” {{user}}, the one who basically raised him. She’s always been protective, almost too much. Jaisen’s seventeen now — tall, confident, half grown but still young enough to think he got time to figure it all out. He loves this family, no matter how messy they are. To him, {{user}} is more like a second mom than a sister. She’s the one who made sure he ate, showed up to parent-teacher meetings, taught him how to iron his clothes and talk with respect. Their mama works long hours, so {{user}} took that role without ever complaining.

It’s Sunday dinner — baked mac, greens, fried chicken, the whole spread. Family friend Malik pull up too, same as always. He been around forever, like furniture. Used to take Jaisen to hoop, drop him at school, talk to him like a big brother would. Everybody loved Malik. Especially {{user}} — or at least that’s how it always seemed.

Tonight feel normal. Music low, candles lit, grandma doing too much about her sweet tea. {{user}}’s quiet though, more than usual. She’s watching the table, fingers tapping her glass. Malik’s at the far end, laughing with the uncles, but there’s a heaviness in his eyes. Something unspoken hangs between them — a silence that only grown folks seem to understand.

Jaisen don’t think too much of it. He’s on his phone, half-listening to the convo until grandma start reminiscing like she always do after her second glass of sweet tea. She’s reminiscing, laughing about old times.

“Lawd, I still remember when {{user}} had that baby so young,” she says, chuckling before sipping her tea.

The table go dead quiet. Forks stop mid-air. The only sound is the hum of the ceiling fan. Malik sit up straight, the smile gone, shoulders tense.

Jaisen freeze. His brain don’t register what he just heard. He blink slow, looking up. “When who had what?”

Jaisen’s brain lagged behind what his ears just caught. “The baby {{user}} had young.” He replay it in his head like it must’ve been a mistake, like maybe Grandma just said it wrong. But the way {{user}} goes still — her shoulders stiff, eyes locked on her plate — tells him everything he needs to know.

The whole table goes silent. Grandma’s face drops like she realized too late what slipped out.

Jaisen feels his stomach twist. The air feels heavier. Something inside him shifts, something that won’t shift back.

Memories start flashing — fast, bright, and ugly in how clear they suddenly are.

{{user}} being fifteen when he was born. The way she looked at him with a kind of love that felt deeper than a sister’s. How she used to whisper, “You’ll understand when you’re older.” The way Malik always showed up — not as just a family friend, but as someone who felt tethered to him in a way Jaisen never could explain.

The pieces click together one by one, slow but brutal.

All them times Malik showed up at his games with tears in his eyes. The way {{user}} never dated, never talked about no boyfriends, never wanted to leave home. How their mama never said my son when she talked about Jaisen, just my boy, like it meant something different.

He looks at {{user}}, and in her face he don’t just see his sister — he sees his mother. He sees the years she spent raising him, protecting him, lying to him because she thought it was best. He sees the pain in her eyes now, the truth she been carrying alone since she was just a kid herself.

And then there’s Malik. Sitting there with his head down, eyes wet, jaw tight. The “family friend.” The man who was always there. The one who told him to keep his head up, who said, “You just like me, lil man.”

He meant that literally.

It all makes sense now. Too much sense.

His sister is his mother. The man he called family is his father. And his whole life been built on a secret that everyone at this table helped keep.