“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 set in the stern expression he wore whenever he wanted to push me into compliance. 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 frozen with my backpack still slung over one shoulder, my textbooks weighing me down like anchors.
I had just walked in from my shift at the campus bookstore, exhausted and hungry, and this was the greeting waiting for me. My name is Ellie. I am twenty-three years old, and I live in Kansas City, Missouri.
Or rather, I lived in my parents’ house there until the moment everything became painfully clear. I had been juggling college classes, working part-time, and somehow becoming the default babysitter for my sister’s two daughters without ever 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 little girls under the age of five. And my sister, Chloe, did nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Chloe was twenty-eight and married to a man named Gregory, who worked in sales and traveled constantly. She stayed home with the girls, or at least that was the story she told everyone at church brunches, family cookouts, and birthday parties under strings of patio lights. In reality, she spent her days scrolling through social media, getting her nails done, and meeting friends for brunch while I shouldered the actual childcare.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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