“That’s what I was, wasn’t I.
The peripheral one.
The one who paid.
The emergency backup.”
“I’m your father,” he said, but the boom had gone out of it; he sounded hollow, scraped out by three days of diesel and public embarrassment.
“I built the life you have.
I gave you a home.”
“No, Dad,” I said, and there was no heat in it, which I think unsettled them more than shouting would have.
“You gave me a childhood, and I paid it back with interest — my twenties and thirties covering your business debts, funding Brynn’s failed startups, paying Mom’s bills, buying you a cruise you could never have afforded yourselves.
Whatever I owed you for raising me, I have paid many times over.