The words came over dinner, casual as commenting on the weather. “We’re taking your office space.”
My father didn’t look up from his plate when he said it. No apology, no preamble, just a statement delivered with the certainty of someone announcing an inevitable fact.
Across the table, my twenty-two-year-old brother Ethan smirked into his soda, already savoring his victory. “His followers need room,” my mother added, as if this explained everything. “All thirty-eight of them.”
I’m Maya.
I’m twenty-six years old, a freelance web developer, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve been the daughter who fixes everything. The one they call when the Wi-Fi dies, when bills need paying, when the car makes concerning noises. The daughter they assume will bend indefinitely without breaking.
My fork paused halfway to my mouth. I could feel the familiar weight settling over me—the expectation that I would protest, argue, maybe even beg. Instead, I set down my fork with deliberate calm and felt something inside me quietly unlock.
“Sure,” I said, my voice steady. “I’ll clear it out tomorrow.”
The garage that doubled as my office wasn’t glamorous. It had a concrete floor, a water heater that groaned occasionally, and boxes of holiday decorations stacked against one wall.
But it was mine. For three years, I’d built my entire business in that space, working sixty-hour weeks hunched over a secondhand desk, taking client calls while wrapped in blankets during winter, celebrating small victories alone at two in the morning when I finally debugged a particularly stubborn piece of code. In that garage, I’d transformed from a recent college graduate into someone who could support herself.
Someone who mattered. Or so I’d thought. My parents expected me to move my operation to the basement—damp, darker, half the size.
They expected gratitude for even that concession. What they didn’t expect was that I was already mentally packing for a different address entirely. The pattern of my life in that house had been set long before that dinner.
I was the responsible one, the capable one, the one who could be counted on to shoulder whatever burden needed carrying. My brother Ethan, meanwhile, was the one who needed support, understanding, and endless second chances. When I was sixteen, I’d saved for months to buy my first real laptop—money earned from babysitting and weekend shifts at a boba shop.
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