Chapter 6
What it meant, I told him, was that I was not going to continue subsidizing the comfort of two children who had been coached to treat me as a placeholder while being given no reason to see me as a person. It meant that the privileges connected to my name were connected to my name for a reason, and that reason had conditions, and those conditions included basic human respect. It meant that if Daniel wanted my support in this household, he needed to actually support me in it, which he had not been doing, and which he needed to understand was not a small thing I was asking for but the thing the entire structure of the family was built on.
Daniel called Melissa that night. I did not ask him to. He went into the bedroom and closed the door and I heard the call go on for forty minutes, and when he came out his face was different, not soft exactly, but settled, the face of a man who has finally stopped managing two separate realities and picked one.
He told me what Melissa had been saying to the kids. Not all of it, but enough. The word temporary had featured prominently. So had the phrase your real family and the suggestion that anything Rachel pays for comes with strings attached, so you should take what she gives but not let her think it means anything. The specific sentence Jason had said to me, the you're just the woman my dad married, had apparently been said at Melissa's kitchen table first.
"I should have handled this a long time ago," Daniel said.
"Yes," I said. "You should have."
"I'm going to handle it now."
"I know," I said. "I'm going to need to see it. Not hear about it. See it."
He nodded.
The next afternoon was the afternoon Jason and Alyssa came home from school and discovered what the house looked like with my name removed from it. The console loaded to a subscription error. The phone showed no service. The streaming app logged out and would not log back in. The Wi-Fi password had changed.
May you like
Alyssa figured it out first. She came downstairs with her phone in her hand and a look on her face that was the first genuinely confused look I had seen on her in three years, because up until that moment she had never had reason to connect my presence in the house to the comfort of the house, and the connection was now very visible.
"What's wrong with everything?" she said.
