Ethan took me to see a band I loved when I was fifteen, driving four hours and back in a single day because I didn’t have a way to get there. He has never once forgotten my birthday. He called me when he got engaged — Olivia first, then me — which is the right order, but the fact that I was second on his list is meaningful.
I love my family in the complicated way you love people who raised you and also sometimes did things that hurt you, and the hurt and the love are not separate. They exist in the same place. You can’t remove one without losing the other.
This is relevant because the story they told about my education wasn’t malicious.
I’ve spent a lot of time — more than I would have admitted two years ago — trying to understand the mechanism. How the thirty-six thousand dollars became a scholarship and my working sixty hours a week became independence by choice.
I think it started the way most comfortable fictions start: not with a decision to deceive, but with a framing that made something easier to explain.
At some family gathering, probably the summer I was at Meadowfield, probably when someone asked about my college plans, someone — most likely my mother, because my mother is the one who manages the family’s narrative the way some people manage social media accounts — said something like “Nora got some great grants and she’s really thriving.” And the person nodded, and that was easier than explaining the full picture, and the full picture would have required explaining why the full picture was what it was.