Before that meeting, my life had a certain moral order to it, even if it was painful. I believed I had grown up in a family where love was uneven, yes, and sometimes conditional, yes, and often filtered through favoritism, certainly—but still basically real. I believed my struggles had at least belonged to reality. That the jobs, the loans, the compromises, the closed doors, the delayed ambitions had all emerged from ordinary family limitation and the unfortunate emotional weather of being the child who was easiest to deny.
After the meeting, that order collapsed.
Because it is one thing to discover that your parents loved your siblings differently.
It is another thing to discover that they built a financial fiction around you and asked you to live inside it as if it were character.