I knew this dinner wasn’t just a celebration. My parents didn’t do “just.” Everything in the Brooks household was a transaction. Love was the currency, and control was the commodity.

We ate in a pleasant, orchestrated silence for twenty minutes. My father, a retired actuary who viewed the world as a series of risk assessments, cut his meat with surgical precision.

“We were talking the other night, your mother and I,” he began, laying his knife and fork down parallel to each other. The signal. The preamble to the pitch.

“Oh?” I kept my voice neutral, focusing on a spot on the wallpaper.

“We were reflecting on how hard those early years were,” my mother chimed in, leaning forward. ” The piano lessons, the private tutors. The way we scrimped to pay for your master’s degree. We went without so many things, Elena, so you could have this future.”

I felt the familiar tightening in my chest, the old conditioning trying to take hold. The debt. The eternal, unpayable debt of being born.