But the inheritance question was not the thing that made what happened wrong. What made it wrong was the process — the absence of consultation, the assumption of my availability as a resource, the treating of decisions that affected me as decisions I didn’t need to be part of. If my parents had come to me and said: we’re thinking of selling the house, here’s what we’re planning to do with the money, we’d like to know what you think — I might still have had feelings about the money going to Adam’s business. But I would have had them as my own feelings to process, not as a consequence of a plan that was made without me.
The process was the problem. Not the money.
I know some people in my position would feel differently about this, and I think they’d be within their rights to. The money isn’t nothing. What it represented isn’t nothing. But I had never built my life around the expectation of what my parents might eventually leave — I had built it, specifically and deliberately, around what I could earn and save myself. And I had done that partly because I had learned early that depending on things that might come from my parents was not a reliable planning strategy.
There is something both liberating and quietly sad about that.
## The Sunday Visit Rhythm
By January, my parents and I had fallen into a pattern of Sunday visits. Not every Sunday — more like three out of four. Sometimes they came to my house, sometimes I drove to the apartment. The visits were ordinary in a way that I found, over time, reassuring rather than anticlimactic.