Part 4
Three months after graduation, my therapist asked me a question I wasn’t ready for.
“When you think about your future,” Dr. Patel said, leaning back in her chair, “do you imagine them in it?”
I stared at the framed print on her wall—a watercolor of a bridge over a river. I’d been seeing her since midway through senior year, after Ava had gently suggested that “maybe you should talk to someone who isn’t me about the whole… family thing.”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Sometimes. Sometimes they’re there, older and softer and apologizing. Sometimes they’re not, and I feel guilty for not caring more.”
“Why do you think you’d need them to apologize?” she asked.
I almost laughed. “Because they hurt me?”
“Yes,” she said. “But you also hurt them by taking the money.”
“I didn’t hurt them,” I replied instinctively. “I… corrected a system.”
“Systems don’t feel things,” she said gently. “People do.”
I bristled. The part of me that had spent years swallowing my own feelings so everyone else could be comfortable wanted to argue that they deserved to feel hurt. That this was the natural consequence of their actions.
Another part of me—the one that still woke up sometimes thinking about my mother’s face on that airport call—knew it wasn’t that simple.
“I won’t apologize for protecting myself,” I said. “But I’m not going to sit here and pretend it was neutral. I know it hurt them. I just… I don’t have room in my head right now to prioritize their pain over mine.”
She nodded. “That sounds like a boundary.”
“It feels like a war,” I admitted.
As summer dipped into fall, my life grew layers.
At work, I learned how to juggle clients who thought “urgent” meant “I forgot to email you three weeks ago and now my boss is angry.” Claire took me under her wing, tossing me into meetings with a casual, “You’ll be fine,” that somehow always turned out to be true.
I started going to trivia nights with coworkers, staying late enough to see the city lights blur in my rearview mirror as I drove home. I bought curtains. A rug. A secondhand bookshelf that I assembled mostly correctly.
I built a life that didn’t pivot around anyone’s approval but my own.
And still, threads from the past tugged.
One Friday evening, as I was finishing up a report, an email pinged into my inbox from my personal account.
Subject: FWD: Family Group Chat
From: Mia.
I hovered for a second, then clicked.
