Responses
Yeah, that is odd.
The evidence for her brother being real are the picture and he was with his grandmother when she died.
But he could've also died alongside his grandmother and MC reacted so badly that she whipped her memory of his death so her parents hid his memorial shrine thing
Or mc is an unreliable narrator concerning those events

I had a theory that that the brother isn't actually real, then I re-read chapter 1 and saw there was a photo of him