“Watch your nieces, or start paying full rent. You already get a discount. Market price is seventeen hundred.”
My mother stood in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed, her voice sharp enough to make the room go still.
My father nodded beside her, his face arranged into the stern expression he used whenever he wanted me to fold before the conversation even began. Behind them, my sister Chloe leaned against the counter with a smug little smile, bouncing her youngest daughter on her hip as if she were posing for a glossy parenting magazine. I stood there frozen, my backpack still hanging from one shoulder, my textbooks dragging me down like anchors.
I had just walked in from my shift at the campus bookstore, exhausted, hungry, and smelling faintly of dust jackets and coffee from the shop next door. And this was the greeting I received. My name is Ellie.
I am twenty-three years old, and I live in Kansas City, Missouri. Or, more accurately, I lived in my parents’ house on the Missouri side, in a neighborhood of trimmed lawns, two-car garages, and neighbors who waved from porches but noticed everything. At least, I did until that moment, when everything became painfully clear.
I had been juggling college classes, part-time work, and somehow becoming the default babysitter for my sister’s two daughters without ever actually agreeing to it. It had started small. Could I watch them for an hour?
Could I pick them up from daycare? Could I help with bedtime? But over the past year, those small requests had snowballed into full days, overnight stays, and entire weekends where I was the only one responsible for two girls under the age of five.
And my sister did almost nothing. Absolutely nothing that matched the story everyone told about her. Chloe was twenty-eight, married to a man named Gregory, who worked in sales and traveled constantly.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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