They hadn’t helped with my college tuition out of love — they did it to keep me tethered.
“After all we’ve done for you,” my mother would say, her voice sweet and poisoned, “you’re really taking that job in the city?”

They were experts at guilt — refined, polite cruelty wrapped in good manners. But nothing could have prepared me for what they did that summer afternoon.

They left my son — Ethan, just eight years old — on the side of a rural road.
Because, as they put it, he was “ruining the fun.”

And they thought I’d just forgive them.

They were wrong.