He didn’t answer for ten minutes. Then: I didn’t know it was that bad, Ava. I thought you just paid the Wi-Fi sometimes.
There are griefs that arrive as violence and griefs that arrive as confirmation. His message was the second kind. I had spent years trying to make what I did look smaller so I wouldn’t seem resentful, so I wouldn’t embarrass them, so I wouldn’t have to hear my mother say I was keeping score. And because I had hidden the scale of it, even my brother—the person benefiting most from the arrangement—had not understood.
I know, I wrote back. That’s part of the problem.
By the time my café shift started, the report had spread. I could tell not only from the relentless messages but from the way Tasha looked at me as she tied on her apron and said, “Hey. You okay?” in a tone that meant somebody had posted something somebody’s aunt had seen.
Small towns don’t need newspapers when they have church groups and family Facebook threads.
I worked anyway. There is something weirdly stabilizing about making drinks while your personal life detonates. The milk still has to steam. The cups still need lids. Tourists still want extra whipped cream and no one at table seven cares that your mother is accusing you of financial sabotage.
Around lunch, Jenna came in on her break from the clinic next door and slid a muffin across the counter toward me without a word. Support, in our friendship, often arrived disguised as carbs.
My break was at two. I was in the tiny back room drinking lukewarm water and staring at twelve unread messages when the door opened and Mason stepped in.
For a second I just looked at him.
He had biked, apparently. His hair was flattened on one side from a helmet, his T-shirt clung damply to his back, and his face looked younger than eighteen and older than that at the same time. Like he had crossed some line in the last twelve hours and wasn’t sure what adulthood was supposed to look like on the other side.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
He hovered until I nodded toward the folding chair across from me.
“Jenna told me when your break was,” he said, sitting. “I didn’t want to call. Dad keeps grabbing phones.”
That sounded exactly like Dad.
For a moment neither of us spoke. The break room fridge hummed. Somebody in the kitchen dropped a tray and swore. I watched Mason pick at a loose thread on his sleeve and thought about all the versions of him my parents had built over the years. The future. The investment. The son who needed more because he had more potential. The child whose wants were somehow destiny while mine were luxuries.
“Did you know?” I asked.
He looked up too fast, hurt flashing clean and immediate across his face. “About the car? No. I swear. Mom just told me last week they were ‘figuring things out’ for tuition.”
I believed him. That was the irritating part. He had never been cruel enough to design this. He had simply grown up in a house where people laid comfort at his feet and told him it was love.
He swallowed. “Grandma’s furious. She asked Dad why his daughter was paying his electric bill while he bought fishing gear. He said it wasn’t her place to question him. Grandma said it became her place when he started crying poor to family while taking money from his kid.”
A laugh tried to escape me and came out more like a breath.
