It went into a private account in Lauren’s name. It was used to pay off her student loans from Fairfield.
My college fund had paid off my sister’s degree.
I sat at the kitchen table and stared at that line for a long time.
Daniel came in with two cups of coffee. He looked over my shoulder.
“That’s yours,” he said. “Isn’t it.”
“That’s mine.”
He put the coffee down very carefully. Then he went out to his truck and sat in it for ten minutes. When he came back, his eyes were red.
“Okay,” he said. “Keep going.”
There’s one more thing I found during those eighteen months. And it’s the thing that broke my heart the most.
It was Thanksgiving, about a year in. I went home for dinner, because if I’d stopped going, Mom would have known something was wrong. I sat through two hours of Paige talking about her kitchen renovation and Lauren talking about her trip to Tulum. I smiled. I said pass the stuffing. Nobody asked about my job.
