“Stop laughing,” Mom whispered. “This isn’t like you.”
I wiped under one eye, still smiling, though it felt less like a smile now and more like a crack in glass. “That’s the first true thing anyone has said.”
Dad’s face tightened. He wore the navy cardigan I had bought him two Christmases earlier, the one Courtney had called “accountant-core” before asking him to help with her electric bill. His hands lay flat on his knees. He was sixty-four and still had the broad shoulders of the man who once carried me on his back at the Fourth of July parade, but he looked smaller that afternoon. Not sorry. Smaller.
“We had access,” he said. “You gave it to us after your surgery.”
“My knee surgery,” I said. “When I was on pain meds and needed you to pay physical therapy copays because I couldn’t drive.”
“You never removed it.”
“I didn’t think I had to remove my own parents from my bank account like malware.”
Courtney made a sound through her nose. “There she is. Amber the martyr.”
I looked at her then. Really looked. She was thirty-two, four years older than me, blonde and polished, with the kind of beauty people mistake for innocence if they do not have to split a bathroom with it. Gold hoops. Pale pink nails. Fresh blowout. A phone faceup on the armchair, the screen still open to a real estate app.
My laugh died.
