“These are reasonable,” Mom says quietly.
Dad turns to stare at her, betrayed by the lack of automatic alignment.
Brooke crosses her arms.
“So you’re not helping with the wedding after everything that happened?”
“I’ll help within these terms,” I say. “As a professional, not as unpaid labor disguised as love.”
Brooke opens her mouth, then shuts it.
I take a breath.
“There’s one more thing.”
All eyes return to me.
“I accepted a six-month design contract in Colorado. I start next month.”
Dad’s hand hits the table hard enough to rattle the spoons.
“You’re leaving? Just like that?”
“I’m pursuing an opportunity,” I say evenly. “The same way you’ve always encouraged Mason to do.”
For once, Dad has nothing ready.
His mouth opens. Closes.
He leans back, thrown off balance by the fact that I am speaking in terms usually reserved for my brother’s dreams.
Mason leans forward.
“I’ve been a terrible brother, haven’t I?”
The question hangs there, raw enough to make my chest ache.
Before I can answer, the front door swings open and Grandma May strides in wearing a camel coat, red lipstick, and the expression of a woman who has come to oversee a necessary correction.
“Well,” she says, setting down her gloves as she approaches our table, “look at this. About time somebody stood up for herself in this family.”
She drags over a chair from the next table without asking and wedges herself between Dad and me.
“Now,” she says, planting both palms on the table, “let’s discuss how this family intends to proceed with a little more equity and a lot more respect.”
I catch my reflection in the front window.
Shoulders back.
Chin level.
Eyes clear.
The mountains gave me that woman.
Or maybe they simply introduced me to the one who had been buried under usefulness all along.
Six months later, the mountains are still outside my window.
Colorado was supposed to be temporary.
A contract.
A season.
A strategic six-month relocation that gave me distance, income, and a clean beginning.
But distance has a way of clarifying what once felt inevitable.
I stand in my apartment in Denver and adjust the blinds, letting in a blade of February light that turns the room white-gold. The air through the cracked window is cold and clean. I would never have allowed myself this much heat loss back in Connecticut, where I was too busy helping pay my parents’ utility bills to enjoy my own comfort.
My place is not large, but it is wholly mine.
A rust-colored sofa. Books stacked in honest piles. A dining table scarred by actual use. A corkboard hung above my desk with postcards from Aspen, Boulder, Santa Fe, and a little stretch of highway outside Vail where the sky looked so wide it made me cry for no reason I could explain.
Each postcard marks a place I went because I wanted to.
Not because someone needed something.
My phone lights up with Mom’s weekly video call.
I inhale once before answering, hearing Dr. Winters in my head.
