So I did not look.

For four months I did not look, while my brother forged my name onto a credit line and my parents charged a Rolex and a yacht to my future, and the not-looking was not trust at all.

It was the same cowardice that had kept me writing checks for six years — the refusal to test whether my family loved me, because I was afraid of the answer.

The shattered mug on the floor was the sound of that refusal ending.

I had finally looked.

And everything I had spent four months, and six years, and thirty years, not letting myself see was there on the screen in cold black font, and I could not un-see it, and the choice I had been avoiding my whole life was, at last, in front of me.