My name is Richard Castellano, I’m twenty-eight years old, and for most of my life I’ve been the person who makes problems disappear. Not in any dramatic or heroic way—just in the quiet, invisible sense of being the one who smooths things over, who absorbs the tension, who carries the weight so everyone else can pretend it doesn’t exist. I’ve been the designated fixer in a family that specialized in breaking things and then acting surprised when someone had to clean up the mess.
I grew up in Westport, Connecticut, one of those picture-perfect suburban towns where the houses look like they belong in architectural magazines and the lawns are maintained with the same intensity most people reserve for raising children. Every street feels like a movie set for the American Dream—white colonials with black shutters, perfectly trimmed hedges, driveways that gleam in the morning sun. It’s the kind of place where people smile automatically when they see you, where everyone knows everyone’s business but pretends they don’t, where appearances matter more than almost anything else.
My childhood was unremarkable in the way that privilege often is—good schools, soccer leagues, piano lessons I never wanted but dutifully attended. My father, Thomas Castellano, was a corporate attorney who worked in Manhattan and commuted home on the 6:47 train every evening, arriving just in time to miss dinner but early enough to pour himself scotch and pretend he’d been present all day. My mother, Patricia, had been a paralegal before she married my father, but she’d given up work to focus on what she called “creating a beautiful home,” which mostly meant obsessing over interior design and hosting dinner parties where everything had to be perfect.
My sister Amanda is three years older than me, and from the moment she was born, she understood instinctively how to work a room. Even as a kid, she had this quality—this magnetic charm that made adults lean in when she spoke, that made other children want to be her friend, that made teachers remember her name years after she’d left their classrooms. She was beautiful in an effortless way, with our mother’s bone structure and our father’s confidence, and she learned early that beauty plus charm could open almost any door.
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