Where they would park.
Nobody asked why I wasn’t invited.
Nobody even mentioned my name.
And perhaps the worst part?
They all knew exactly why.
My name is Elise Montgomery.
I was thirty-three years old.
I worked hard.
Paid my bills.
Never asked anyone for anything.
Yet for nearly a decade, I had secretly been financing the very people who had just publicly announced I wasn’t family.
Every time my parents had an emergency…
I paid.
Every time my brother got himself into trouble…
I paid.
Every time there was a crisis, a setback, an unexpected expense, a promise that they would “pay me back next month”…
I paid.
Thousands became tens of thousands.
Tens of thousands became more than I wanted to calculate.
But according to them?
I still wasn’t “real family.”
I stared at my phone while strangers pushed shopping carts around me.
Part of me wanted to type a response.
A very long response.
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