My parents refused to pay for my college tuition, saying I should be "independent," but they offered to cover all of my sister's expenses. So I left home. 9 years later, at my sister's wedding, they said to me, "Why is this missing piece here?" But my sister's fiancé turned pale and said, "Shut up! This person is..."

“Blaine! Wait!”

Patrice scurried after us as Sarah and I turned toward the grand exit. She had lost one of her earrings, and her plum satin gown was dragged along the marble, gathering dust and champagne moisture from the floor.

She reached out to grab my arm, but Sarah stepped smoothly between us, her gaze turning to flint.

“Do not touch my husband,” Sarah said, her voice dropping into a register of icy, absolute authority that made Patrice pull her hand back as if she had brushed a hot stove.

“Blaine, please,” Patrice begged, tears cutting deep tracks through her foundation. “You’re my son. You’re my firstborn baby. How can you walk away from us like this? Look at what’s happening! Leonard’s career is over! Belle’s life is ruined! What are people going to say?”

“They’ll probably say that you reap what you sow, Patrice,” I said.

“We did what we thought was best!” she wailed, indifferent now to the dozens of phones being discreetly held up by guests in the hallway, recording every second of her collapse. “We didn't know you would become this! If you had just told us! If you had come home and showed us what you were doing, we would have celebrated you! We would have been so proud of you!”

I stopped and looked down at her.

That was the core of it, wasn't it? The great, rotting truth at the center of their existence.

“You wouldn't have been proud of me, Patrice,” I said softly. “You would have tried to claim ownership of me. You would have used my work to pay for Belle’s lifestyle, just like you used my teenage paychecks to pay for her vacations. You didn't want a son who succeeded. You wanted an asset you could liquidate.”

“That’s not true!” she cried. “Leonard, tell him!”

Leonard hadn't moved from the hallway. He was leaning against a marble pillar, staring blankly at the floor, his face completely devoid of expression. His prestige, his clinic, his country club standing, his daughter’s grand alliance—the entire fragile house of cards he had spent forty years constructing with borrowed money and stolen credit had collapsed in less than twenty minutes.

“Blaine,” Leonard muttered, not looking up. “The house. The mortgage.”

I looked at him across the widening gulf of the hotel lobby.

“The mortgage payments are due on the first of the month, Leonard,” I said. “The servicing company will handle your account. If you miss a payment, they will foreclose according to standard state procedures. You won't receive special treatment, and you won't receive cruelty. You’ll be treated exactly like any other stranger who owes money to a corporation.”

“You’re throwing us out onto the street?” Patrice gasped.