Chapter 3
The wedding call changed that.
I married Marcus three weeks later in a small ceremony with twenty-two guests, none of whom were my parents or my sister. Marcus's family welcomed me with the kind of warmth I had spent my whole life mistaking for something only other families got to have. His mother cried during the toast. His father walked me partway down the aisle, at my request, because I didn't want that role to remain empty out of spite — I wanted it filled by someone who had actually shown up.
I did not speak to my parents for the eleven months that followed.
I used that time to build something. Marcus and I had been saving quietly for two years toward a small commercial lease downtown — a dream I'd mentioned to my parents exactly twice, both times met with mild interest and immediate redirection back to whatever Clarissa needed. We opened Thistle & Crumb on a corner two blocks from the bakery where I'd worked at fourteen. I ran the kitchen. Marcus ran the books. We worked eighty-hour weeks for the first year and built something that, by our second anniversary, had a line out the door most Saturday mornings and a write-up in the Portland food section that made my hands shake when I first read it.
My mother called four days after the article ran.
"Athena," she said, voice trembling, the same register she'd used for the mortgage call eight years earlier. "We need help. Family helps family."
I almost laughed. Instead, I asked her to come to the bakery in person, told her to bring my father and Clarissa, and hung up before she could negotiate the terms.
May you like
They arrived on a Tuesday afternoon in October, the café half full, golden light coming through the windows onto the pastry case. I had a folder waiting on the counter — eight years of bank transfers, texts, screenshots of those Facebook posts I had never deleted, every receipt of every time I had said yes when I should have said nothing at all.
"We need help," my mother said again, standing at the counter, nervous but still managing to sound like she was the one doing me a favor by asking. "Family helps family."
