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“I’m not—”

“You have any idea what I gave up?” Her voice rises, nasty with old resentment.

“Mom—”

“I could have had a life.” My mouth snaps shut. There it is—the old wound laid bare between us. My existence. Her sacrifice. How everything bad that’s ever happened to her traces back to me.

She leans in, her breath warm against my face. “You think raising you was free? Your dad dies and leaves me with everything, and you think because you stock shelves a couple nights a week, suddenly you don’t owe anybody shit?”

Dad.

“Don’t.” It comes out choked.

She blinks slowly. “What?”

“Don’t talk about Dad.” My hands curl into fists at my sides.

She scowls at me. “He left me with you.”

My vision blurs. “He died!”

She doesn’t even flinch. “Same result.”

Something gives way inside me—not a break, but a quiet unraveling, one final thread snapping after years of strain.

My voice is barely audible. “Where is the money?”

Mom shrugs, a careless roll of her shoulders. “Gone.”

The room seems to shrink, walls pressing in. My vision tunnels until all I see is her smug face.

My words come out strained. “What do you mean gone?”

She examines a chipped nail. “I had bills.”

My heart hammers against my ribs. “All of it? Already?”

A dismissive wave of her hand. “Most.” The word lands like a slap.

My throat tightens further. “Most?”

“I paid some shit off.”

“What did you pay off?”

Her eyes finally meet mine, cold and utterly bored. “Why does it matter?”

“Because it was four thousand dollars!” My voice breaks as it echoes off the walls.

“Forty-seven hundred,” she corrects, her tone clipped and exact. The precision twists my stomach into knots. She counted it. Of course, she counted it.

“What did you do?”

“Paid the rent ahead.”

“We own this place!”

“Your rent. You haven’t been handing over enough lately, so I took an advance.”