I thought Dad might start treating me differently when I became an adult.

Maybe he’d ask what I wanted to do with my future.

Maybe he’d finally tell me something about Mom.

Maybe we’d find a way to become the kind of father and son who could sit at the kitchen table without every conversation ending in silence.

Instead, on my eighteenth birthday, he handed me a scrap of paper with a number written on it.

Two hundred and fifty dollars.