At no point in that email chain did anyone mention my name or the thirty-six thousand dollars.
Which meant either Ethan never knew about the specific allocation, never knew the money had been promised to me by name, and just thought his parents were adjusting their general savings to support his education…or he knew and didn’t say anything.
I can’t prove which is true. But reading that email thread, what I saw was not a brother who’d demanded the money. What I saw was someone who’d asked his parents for help and received it, and who had no particular reason to wonder where the money was coming from because nobody told him.
This doesn’t change what my parents did. It changes who I’m angry at and why.
I told Sophie this.
“It’s possible to be angry at your parents and also want Ethan to actually know what happened,” she said. “They’re not the same conversation.”
She was right.
The Sibling Conversation
I asked Ethan to meet for lunch, just the two of us.
He picked a sandwich place near his apartment, a deli with a small menu and no atmosphere that he’d been going to since he’d moved to the neighborhood six years ago. He arrived before me, which is unusual, and already had coffee on the table.
He looked, as he usually looked, slightly distracted and genuinely glad to see me. Ethan has a warmth that I’ve never successfully resented even when I’ve wanted to. He was wearing paint-stained jeans, which meant he’d been working, which meant his freelance calendar was busy, which happens in waves and apparently it was a wave.