The email is five sentences long. It says: “Your father and I have been talking. We want you to know the money is there when you need it. Thirty-six thousand set aside, like we discussed. Don’t worry about that part. Focus on finding the right program.”
Five sentences. One of them telling me not to worry.
I read it at eleven-thirty on a Tuesday night, sitting at my kitchen table with the lamp on because the overhead light has been flickering for a month and I keep forgetting to replace the bulb. I read it twice. Then I took a screenshot, sent it to myself, and sat with it for a while.
This is the thing about having a written record of something you already knew. It doesn’t exactly change what you know. What it changes is how confident you feel about saying it out loud.
But I’m still getting ahead of myself.
In April of my senior year, my parents told me the money had been redirected. My father used the word “redirected.” He said they’d had to make a hard choice and they’d made it. He said Ethan’s program required more investment and they couldn’t ask him to stop.
I asked, with the kind of quiet that comes from not trusting your voice, whether there was anything left.
My father said there wasn’t.
My mother said she’d looked into some options. There were grants, she said. There were loans. She said lots of students took loans and it was totally normal and it didn’t have to be a big thing.