“We’re giving the billions to Brent,” Dad said. “Now get out. You’re fired.”
I stared.
“So you sold my code?”
Mom laughed. “We sold our company.”
The buyer stood up. My name is Lorie Kirk.
I am 41 years old. And on the worst morning of my life, my own parents fired me in front of a room full of strangers, sold the company I built from nothing, and handed every last penny to my younger brother, who had never written a single line of code in his entire life. I grew up in Cedar Falls, Iowa, in a modest two-story house on Tremont Street with chipped paint on the shutters and a garden that my mother, Darinda Kirk, maintained with almost religious devotion.
My father, Gideon Kirk, was a mechanical engineer who worked at a manufacturing plant about 40 minutes outside of town. He was the kind of man who believed that hard work was its own reward and that complaining about anything was a sign of weakness. He never told me he was proud of me.
Not once. Not when I graduated valedictorian from Cedar Falls High School. Not when I earned a full ride to the University of Iowa.
Not when I got accepted into the graduate program in computational biology at MIT. The closest he ever came was a nod across the dinner table the night I told him about MIT. He looked at my mother, then back at me and said, “Well, do not waste it.”
My mother was different, but not in the way you might hope.
Dorinda was warm and affectionate, but only to one person, and that person was not me. That person was my younger brother, Brent. Brent was born when I was 7 years old.
And from the moment he arrived, wrapped in a blue hospital blanket with a full head of dark hair, I became invisible. I do not say that for sympathy. I say it because it is simply what happened.
Dorinda carried Brent everywhere. She sang to him. She decorated his room with stars and planets.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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