Nobody else.” It was the smallest possible thing, a toddler delighted by a private bathroom, and it told me everything about what our life in that apartment had actually been costing her, in ways too small for her to name.

I took on additional freelance editing work, late-night manuscripts, to cover our expenses and my mounting legal bills.

And for the first time in my entire adult life, I stopped all financial disbursements to every single member of my family, with one exception: I kept paying for my father’s heart medication.

Without my quiet subsidy propping it up, the rest of my family’s artificial lifestyle began, within weeks, to collapse like a house of cards.

I did not enjoy watching it collapse.