That sentence had controlled most of my childhood.
Please don’t make this harder.
Meaning: Give Brielle what she wants.
Brielle had always been the beautiful one, the fragile one, the daughter who “needed support.”
I was the dependable one.
The practical one.
The one who started working at sixteen, helped cover the electric bill through college, and somehow became the family emergency fund before I was old enough to realize how absurd that was.
Six weeks earlier, Brielle announced that her thirtieth birthday couldn’t be “some depressing steakhouse dinner.”
She wanted an “immersive rooftop experience.”
A private downtown venue.
Custom flowers.
A live band.
Photographer.
Videographer.
Cocktail stations.
Designer favors.
A dessert wall.
Forty carefully chosen guests.
Her first budget had been twenty-five thousand dollars.
Then forty.
Then sixty.
Eventually, nearly eighty thousand dollars.
I laughed the first time she showed me the spreadsheet.
She didn’t.
Now she was standing in my hospital room asking for the first payment.
