Thirty-six months. Twenty-eight thousand eight hundred dollars.
I knew the exact number because I had calculated it in the middle of the night when the house was quiet and the weight of our own debt felt like a physical pressure on my chest. That money was Mason’s college fund. It was the repair for the roof that leaked every time it rained in April. It was the name-brand cereal.
My husband, Jake, had been a saint about it, but even saints have their limits.
“Elena, they own their house in Oak Creek outright,” he had said a few months ago, his voice gentle but firm. “Your dad has a pension from the city. Your mom has Social Security. We are struggling to keep our heads above water, yet we’re sending them a third of our mortgage payment every month. What are we actually covering?”
But I was a daughter, and daughters are conditioned to believe. I believed them when they said the cost of Dad’s heart medication had tripled. I believed them when they said the winter utilities in their old Victorian home were astronomical. I believed them when they said retirement wasn’t the golden sunset they had been promised.
I believed because the alternative—that my parents were lying to me—was a grief I wasn’t ready to carry.
I pulled into our driveway, seeing Mason’s bicycle lying on the grass. Tomorrow was his birthday. My parents weren’t coming. And as I looked at the generic cereal box in the bag, I felt a cold, hard knot of something that felt very much like the beginning of an end.
Chapter 2: The Seven-Year-Old’s Silence
The party was a quiet affair, held in our backyard under a string of lights that Jake had spent two hours untangling. We had twelve kids from the neighborhood, a homemade chocolate cake that leaned precariously to the left because I had rushed the frosting, and a handful of dollar-store decorations I had hung at midnight the night before.
Mason was a golden child—all messy hair and bright eyes. But those eyes kept drifting toward the side gate every time a car door slammed on the street.
“When are Grandma and Grandpa coming, Mommy?” he asked for the third time. He was holding a plastic dinosaur, his thumb tracing its jagged spine.
“They’re busy, buddy,” I said, the lie tasting like ash in my mouth. “They had some things they had to take care of at home.”
