“I know when you gave birth.”
“Then maybe this conversation can wait.”
“It can’t.”
My mother sighed.
“Natalie, please don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”
That sentence had controlled most of my childhood.
Please don’t make this harder.
Meaning: Give Brielle what she wants.
Brielle had always been the beautiful one, the fragile one, the daughter who “needed support.”
I was the dependable one.
The practical one.
The one who started working at sixteen, helped cover the electric bill through college, and somehow became the family emergency
