That was the arrangement I had never quite let myself see: I paid, and they took the credit, and the paying itself was made invisible, folded into the family myth of people who took care of their own.
Except that I was the one taking care, and I was not counted among the own.
I was the mechanism by which the family got to feel like a family, and mechanisms do not get seats at the table.
They get maintained, when they squeak, and otherwise ignored.
I told myself, for the better part of a decade, that this was simply what love looked like when you were the capable one.
I know better now.
The capable one is not more loved.
She is more used.
The two can feel identical from the inside for a very long time, right up until the afternoon your mother texts you out of a vacation you paid for, and the difference becomes suddenly, permanently clear.
Chapter 4 — The Cruise