“Mom’s helping with the car,” Greg said. He took the laptop out of my hands and closed it.
It hurt. All of it. But I kept quiet.
Our family was already under enough pressure. I didn’t want to be the one who broke it.
That was my mistake. I know that now. I thought keeping quiet was the same as keeping the peace.
It isn’t. It’s just letting someone else decide what the peace looks like.
Eventually, things got better.
Greg found work. Not as good as Brandt. A dispatcher job at a trucking yard in Fairview. Less money. But steady. I kept some of the extra shifts anyway and threw every spare dollar at the principal.
Little by little. Year by year.
And three weeks ago, I made the very last mortgage payment from my phone in the pharmacy break room, and I cried into a vending-machine granola bar.
