The University of Denver stadium shimmered in May sunlight, a blur of navy gowns and proud families waving phones in the air like digital torches marking their children’s victories. When my name echoed through the speakers—”Camila Elaine Reed, Master of Data Analytics, summa cum laude”—I looked up instinctively, muscle memory overriding logic, searching the section I’d specifically reserved three months ago. The “Family Reserved” seats glared back at me, empty and metallic under the afternoon sun.
Not a single person. Not my mother, not my father, not even my sixteen-year-old sister Avery, who I’d been financially supporting since she was twelve years old. Just vacant plastic chairs reflecting light like a mirror showing me exactly what I’d always been to them: optional.
I forced a smile for the photographer, holding my diploma a little too tight, my cheeks aching from the effort of pretending I wasn’t breaking inside. Around me, joy erupted like fireworks. Students kissed their parents.
Friends collapsed into bouquets and tears. A woman next to me disappeared into a group hug so tight I could hear her grandmother sobbing with pride, saying “I knew you could do it, baby, I always knew.”
I stood alone beside a stranger’s celebration, my smile shrinking with each passing second, wondering what it felt like to be someone’s reason for proud tears. This wasn’t new.
I should have known better than to hope. Hope, I’d learned over twenty-six years, was a luxury I couldn’t afford when it came to my family. They’d skipped my undergraduate graduation four years earlier from UC Boulder.
“Avery has finals,” my mother had said when I called, confused, standing outside the stadium in my cap and gown at seven in the morning. “You understand, right? She’s only fourteen.
High school is crucial for her future.”
I’d been twenty-two, graduating with honors and a computer science degree I’d earned while working fifty hours a week. But I’d swallowed the disappointment like bitter medicine and said, “Of course, Mom. I understand.”
They didn’t send a card.
Didn’t call later that day or the next. Just a text three days afterward: Can you send $300? Avery needs new soccer cleats and the tournament fees are due tomorrow.
I’d sent five hundred dollars, telling myself that’s what good daughters did—they understood, they sacrificed, they made things easier for everyone else even when their own hearts were quietly breaking. The pattern had started long before college. When I turned sixteen and got my first job at Starbucks, working early morning shifts before school, my mother began what she called “asking for little extras.” Piano lessons for Avery.
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