My name is Rachel, and for most of my life, I learned to be invisible.
Not because I wanted to be — but because the people who were supposed to love me made sure I stayed small.
When I was five, a drunk driver took both of my parents away from me in an instant. My memories of them are like old photographs — fading, soft around the edges. My mother’s laugh.
My father’s hands lifting me high above his head. And then nothing.
The Hayes family adopted me soon after. To outsiders, they looked like saviors — a beautiful home, smiles for the camera, promises of a better life.
But behind those perfect family portraits was a truth I learned too young: I was never really one of them.
They had two children of their own — Victoria, ten, and Kenneth, eight.
And though I tried to fit in, I soon learned I was only there to fill the empty space in their charity story.
By six, I’d stopped expecting kindness.
When Victoria complained that I got “special treatment” for a new school dress, my adoptive mother, Patricia, sighed and bought her three more outfits — while I wore mine until it fell apart. When I asked for piano lessons, my father, Gregory, didn’t even look up from his newspaper.
“Those things cost money, Rachel. We’re already doing enough.”
What I didn’t know then was that they had received $750,000 from a trust my real parents left behind — money meant for me.
But instead of securing my future, it paid for private schools, new cars, and lavish vacations for their biological children.
I just thought we were poor — that I was a burden.
I was wrong. We weren’t poor. They were just greedy.
Victoria made sure I remembered it every day.
“You’re lucky to be here,” she’d say sweetly before mocking my secondhand clothes. Kenneth didn’t say much — silence was his cruelty. He’d introduce Victoria as his sister but never me.
By high school, I stopped asking for affection.
Instead, I poured myself into schoolwork and art — the only spaces where I felt free.
I worked part-time to buy my own clothes, saved for college, and told myself I could build a different life.
When I got into a top art school, Gregory said,
“We can’t afford that. You’ll go to community college.”
Victoria went to an elite private college the next year.
With my trust fund money.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
TAP → NEXT PAGE → 👇
