“About the money.”
He nodded.
“Yes.”
David spoke next.
“We kept telling ourselves we were worried about you. And we were. But that wasn’t the whole truth.”
I waited.
Finally, he said it.
“We thought of your savings as family money.”
My throat tightened.
“Your inheritance.”
“Yes.”
There was something almost shocking about hearing him admit it plainly.
“We shouldn’t have,” he continued. “But we did.”
Ryan stepped beside him.
“When you spent that money on tuition, we acted like you were taking something away from us.”
“Something that wasn’t yours.”
“I know.”
I placed the folder on the counter.
“So you punished me for it.”
David’s eyes were wet.
“At first, we thought you would stop.”
I frowned.
“You thought I’d fail.”
“No. We thought you’d try it for a semester and realize it wasn’t for you.”
“And when I didn’t?”
David looked away.
“We became embarrassed.”
“For me?”
He shook his head.
“For ourselves.”
Ryan gave a small, miserable laugh.
“Every semester you completed made everything we’d said look worse.”
“So instead of admitting you were wrong, you stayed away?”
“Yes.”
A car pulled up outside.
Then another.
I glanced through the kitchen window.
“Who is that?”
My sons exchanged a look.
Ryan gave me a nervous smile.
“Probably your classmates.”
I turned sharply.
“My what?”
“And a couple of professors,” David added.
I stared at them as if they had started speaking another language.
“How do you know my classmates?”
