They had trained the word out of me the way you train a dog off a couch, with enough small punishments that eventually you just stop trying to climb up.

But standing in that doorway, watching the two-pronged cruelty of it laid bare — my father being robbed of his rest, myself being fitted for a debt that would follow me for years — the word came back to me whole and enormous, and it did not feel selfish at all.

It felt like the most moral thing I had ever refused to do.

Enabling is not love.