My Mother Screamed That I Had an Iceberg Where My Soul Should Be and Slammed the Door Hard Enough to Rattle the Photos — I Stood There Waiting for the Guilt That Always Came, and for the First Time in Thirty-Two Years, It Never Did

Once I saw the books clearly, I could not unsee them.

That is the thing about an honest audit.

It does not care how long you believed the fiction.

It simply shows you the numbers, and the numbers do not lie, and after that you cannot go back to pretending they said something else.

Chapter 4 — The Door

I had just gotten Iris down toward sleep when the front door was thrown open without a knock, hard enough to slam against the drywall with a crack like a gunshot.

My whole body seized.