…since they couldn’t be expected to struggle in a small apartment when their child lived like royalty.
I stared at them, the coffee cup freezing halfway to my mouth. The silence in my living room was deafening, broken only by the hum of the refrigerator in my chef’s kitchen.
“Excuse me?” I asked, sure I had misheard.
“It just makes sense,” my mother said, waving her hand dismissively as she looked around at the floor-to-ceiling windows and the view of the city skyline. “We sold the old house, but the market is terrible. Everything we looked at today was a dump. We can’t live like that. You have five bedrooms here. You’re single. You don’t need all this space.”
My father nodded, leaning back into my Italian leather sofa as if he had paid for it. “We’ll take the master suite on the ground floor. It’s better for your mother’s knees.”
I felt a laugh bubbling up in my chest—a cold, bitter laugh.
Seventeen years ago, on my 18th birthday, these same two people had thrown two garbage bags of clothes onto the front lawn. My father had stood in the doorway and told me, “If you aren’t going to medical school, you aren’t a son of ours. We don’t raise artists. We don’t raise failures. Get out.”
I had slept in my car for three months. I washed dishes to pay for community college. I clawed my way up from nothing to become one of the most sought-after architects in the state. They never called on my birthday. They never called when I graduated. They never called when I opened my firm.
They only called last week because they were in town and “wanted to see me.” I went out of morbid curiosity. I drove them around while they critiqued every house they saw, complaining about prices. And now, they were sitting in the empire I built, trying to claim it.
“You’re not moving in,” I said calmly.
My father’s face went red. “Excuse me? We are your parents. We raised you.”
“You raised me until I had a mind of my own,” I corrected him. “Then you threw me away. You made it very clear that I was a disappointment because I wasn’t a doctor.”
“That was a long time ago,” my mother sniffed. “Don’t be dramatic. We’re family. And we need this. We can’t afford the lifestyle we’re used to anymore.”
“That sounds like a diagnosis I’m not qualified to treat,” I said, standing up. “Since, you know, I’m not a doctor.“
I walked to the front door and pulled it open wide.
“My house is for the people who believed in me when I had nothing,” I said, my voice shaking just slightly. “It is not a retirement plan for the people who tried to break me. Please leave.”
My father started to shout, but I simply pointed to the driveway. They left, cursing me as they went, calling me ungrateful.
I locked the door behind them, turned back to my empty, beautiful, quiet house, and for the first time in 17 years, I didn’t feel the need to prove anything to anyone.
