I thought maybe that was it.
Then yesterday, they showed up at my front door.
Both of them. Trent too.
Pale. Worn. Desperate.
No insults this time. No mocking. No talk of filthy work. Just pleading.
They asked for four hundred thousand dollars.
My father, it turned out, had mortgaged their house for some “investment opportunity.” A questionable real estate deal. The kind of thing men like him get into when they believe they deserve to win. Now they were drowning and wanted the one person they’d tried to exile to throw them a rope.
They stood on my porch crying and apologizing, telling me they were wrong, telling me family should stick together, telling me they had nowhere else to turn.
I listened. Quietly.
Then I said, “If you can tell me my birthday, I’ll help.”
Five minutes of silence followed.
They looked at each other, confused, scrambling through memory like it was a messy drawer.
My father guessed October.
Trent guessed the fifteenth.
My mother stared at the porch railing like the answer might be written there.
None of them knew that my birthday is December 23rd.