The kitchen smelled like vanilla and burnt butter on the morning of my eighteenth birthday, a combination that should have been comforting but instead made my stomach turn with an unease I couldn’t quite name. My mother stood at the stove flipping pancakes with mechanical precision, humming slightly off-key to a song that wasn’t playing. My younger sister Chloe bounced around the kitchen island like she’d consumed three energy drinks before breakfast, scrolling through Instagram with one hand while gesturing wildly with the other about her upcoming freshman year at Whitmore College—a private liberal arts school whose annual tuition exceeded what most people earned in a year.

“I’m definitely rushing Theta,” Chloe announced to no one in particular, her French-manicured nails clicking against her juice glass.

“Their house just got completely renovated. It’s literally all over their Instagram. And I absolutely need a new laptop before orientation.

The MacBook Pro, obviously. The sixteen-inch one. My current laptop is practically ancient.”

Her “ancient” laptop was eleven months old.

I knew because I’d been there when Dad bought it for her last Christmas, along with the AirPods, the designer backpack, and the gift card to Sephora that she’d complained wasn’t enough.

I sat quietly at the counter, nursing black coffee that had gone lukewarm while I waited for whatever this morning was supposed to be. My eighteenth birthday. The day I officially became an adult in the eyes of the law, though I’d been functioning as one for far longer than that.

I’d been looking forward to discussing my own college plans—the acceptance letter from State University sitting in my desk drawer, the partial academic scholarship I’d earned with my 3.8 GPA, the careful spreadsheets I’d created showing exactly how my college fund, combined with my savings from two years of working at Morrison’s Grocery, would cover tuition, room, board, and books with enough left over for emergencies.

Everything had been perfectly aligned. I’d done everything right—worked hard, saved carefully, planned meticulously. I should have known that in my family, doing everything right only made you the most convenient person to exploit when things went wrong for the golden child.

My father waited until the last pancake had been plated, until my mother had wiped down the already spotless counter for the third time, until Chloe had finally paused her social media scroll long enough to take a bite of food.