They don’t know that last month, I negotiated a six-hundred-million-dollar cyber logistics contract for the Department of Defense. They don’t know that my “studio apartment” is a decoy address I use for mail, while my real home is a fifteen-million-dollar fortress of glass and steel built into the side of a mountain in Aspen. They don’t know that I could buy the airline we were supposed to fly on with the liquidity in my checking account.

I stopped at a kiosk to buy a bottle of water, my hand shaking slightly as I tapped my card. Not from sadness—from the sheer, blinding clarity of it all.

For years, I had been the silent architect of their comfort. I remembered the day Brittany graduated college. My mother, Constance, had pulled me aside, tears welling in her perfectly mascaraed eyes, whispering that the eighty-thousand-dollar student loan debt was crushing the family.

“We just want her to start fresh, Briona,” she had said, clutching my arm. “You’re the only one who can help.”

I paid it off the next morning. I didn’t get a thank you. I got a text from Brittany asking if I could also cover her “post-grad decompression trip” to Bali. I paid for that, too.