After the coffee with Olivia, I went home and opened the folder. I hadn’t looked at it in years — not since I’d finished repaying my loans at twenty-nine, when I went through my records and calculated the final total and then closed most of the tabs and went for a walk.
Now I read through it more carefully.
My total education costs, over six years, were a little under forty-eight thousand dollars. That matched what I remembered. The grants — nine thousand total, distributed across the six years in amounts between fifteen hundred and two thousand per year — were clearly documented. The loans were clearly documented. The seventeen thousand I’d actually paid out of my work earnings was the remainder, and I could see pieces of it in the work schedules and the bank statements I’d kept out of the same habit that made me keep tuition statements.
The grants were real. They were also, very clearly, not a full scholarship.
I also found, in an older folder labeled “family stuff,” a birthday card from my parents my senior year of high school. In my father’s handwriting, on the inside, it said: “Thinking about what comes next. You’re going to do great things, and the plan is solid. Love, Dad.”
The plan is solid.
He meant the financial plan. He meant the thirty-six thousand. I know because he’d said it explicitly three weeks before, sitting at the kitchen table, when I’d asked if we should sit down and go through the numbers before I sent in applications.