Tessa was thirty-two and had lived in our parents’ spare bedroom for eleven of the previous twelve years.
There had been one ten-month exception when she lived with a bartender named Kyle.
Kyle eventually returned her to the premises.
Tessa was the undisputed golden child.
Ron and Linda denied it passionately, relying on the classic parental statement:
We love you both equally, just differently.
Translated from family language, that meant one child received endless emotional and financial support while the other was contacted whenever the basement flooded or the router stopped working.
I was the router child.
Tessa was displaced royalty.
She changed occupations roughly every nine months.
She had been a holistic nail technician, a canine aura reader, a custom candle maker, and, for six strange weeks, a “digital nomad” who never actually left Ohio.
At the time of the footwear incident, she was building an empire around “intention-based home accessories.”
