But they had left me holding the reservation.
That changed everything.
There is a particular kind of power that the people who use you never think to guard against, because it is the power that was theirs to take and they simply couldn’t be bothered.
My family had never once, in thirty-three years, involved themselves in the mechanics of the things I paid for.
They did not want to know how the sausage was made; they wanted to eat it and compliment the cook and forget the cook existed.
They had never asked whose card the deposit went on, whose email the confirmations landed in, whose login held the whole trip together, because those were details, and details were beneath them, and handling the details was my job — the same way handling everything had always been my job.
And that incuriosity, that lifelong refusal to look at how the machine actually ran, was now the exact thing that had left the entire machine in my hands.
They had outsourced the labor to me for so long that they had, without ever noticing, outsourced the control along with it.
The person who does all the work, it turns out, is holding all the levers.
They had just counted on her never once thinking to pull one.