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I knew this dinner wasn\u2019t just a celebration. My parents didn\u2019t do \u201cjust.\u201d Everything in the Brooks household was a transaction. Love was the currency, and control was the commodity.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were talking the other night, your mother and I,\u201d he began, laying his knife and fork down parallel to each other. The signal. The preamble to the pitch.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh?\u201d I kept my voice neutral, focusing on a spot on the wallpaper.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were reflecting on how hard those early years were,\u201d my mother chimed in, leaning forward. \u201d The piano lessons, the private tutors. The way we scrimped to pay for your master\u2019s degree. We went without so many things, Elena, so you could have this future.\u201d<\/p>\n
I felt the familiar tightening in my chest, the old conditioning trying to take hold.\u00a0The debt.\u00a0The eternal, unpayable debt of being born.<\/p>\n