He made air quotes around the word CEO, because of course he did.
“Our little sister,” he added, grin widening. “The entrepreneur.”
His wife Amanda giggled instantly, the way she always did when he wanted backup.
“That’s actually kind of cute,” she said. “Like a lemonade stand, but with computers.”
The table laughed again.
“It’s not quite like that,” I began.
“Elena has always had an active imagination,” my mother cut in smoothly, and I watched, not for the first time, how effortlessly she could move a room away from me and toward the story she preferred. She was no longer speaking to me now. She was speaking about me to the room, the way one discusses a complicated niece or a disappointing family friend. “Even as a child, she’d tell these elaborate stories about what she was going to do one day. We kept thinking she would outgrow it. But she never really did.”
“Twenty-eight years old,” my father added, “and still living in a fantasy world. Pretending she’s building some empire from her studio apartment.”
“It’s a two-bedroom,” I said before I could stop myself.
It was such a stupid correction, and I knew it the second I made it. Not because the apartment mattered in the moral sense, but because I could already hear how it would sound to them: defensive, small, proving the wrong point.
