I took a breath.
"The total is thirty-eight thousand, six hundred and forty dollars. Every page has a receipt, a bank statement, or an invoice. Sophie checked all of it."
"Sophie," my mother repeated, the name sharp in her mouth. "You went to a lawyer?"
"I went to a friend who happens to be a lawyer."
"So that's it," she said. Her voice climbed. "You want the house. That's what this is. You've been planning this. Three years of 'helping' so you could stand in my doorway and threaten to take my home out from under me."
"I don't want your house."
"Then what do you want?"
It was the first real question she'd asked me in a very long time.
And I had an answer ready, because I had said it out loud in Sophie's office on Monday morning and felt my whole chest open up.
"I want my life back," I said.
There was a letter in the box too, tucked into the front pocket of the binder. Sophie had helped me write it, but every word of it was mine. My father found it and unfolded it, and he read it aloud because my mother wouldn't.
It wasn't dramatic. That was the point. It said that I was moving out, effective immediately, which was what they had asked for. It said that the utilities and the home internet, which had been in my name for three years, would be transferred out of my name or canceled on the fifteenth of October, giving them two weeks to set up their own accounts. It said the automatic property tax installment that I had been paying from my checking account every quarter had already been stopped.
And it said that I was requesting repayment of thirty-eight thousand, six hundred and forty dollars, over whatever reasonable schedule they could manage, with no interest, documented in a simple written agreement.
The last paragraph was the one I had rewritten nine times.
I am not doing this to punish you. I am doing this because for three years I paid for a place in this family, and I have just learned that I never actually had one. I'd rather be owed money than owe anyone my self-respect. If you ever want a relationship with me that isn't a transaction, my door will be open. But it will be my door.
When my father finished reading, the hallway was completely silent except for Theo making quiet roaring noises at the dog-shaped doorstop.
