That night, my father handed my brother keys to a brand new car while the whole family cheered. Then he turned to me and quietly pressed a bill into my hand for $900 in back rent. I did not cry or argue. I just smiled, but something slammed shut inside me. I walked out, leaving only a single note behind. That piece of paper would eventually crack our family’s foundation in ways none of them ever expected.
My name is Kylie Foster. I am thirty-four years old, and my official title at the Northgate Family Advocacy Center is Lead Coordinator. In plain English, that means I spend forty hours a week sitting across from people whose lives have just detonated. I help them navigate the wreckage of domestic disputes, sudden evictions, and the kind of quiet, suffocating financial crises that happen behind closed doors in nice neighborhoods. I am the person who hands them a tissue, looks them in the eye, and says, “We have a plan.” I am professional. I am steady. I am the one who fixes things. But on a humid Saturday evening in Raleigh, North Carolina, standing in the living room I had grown up in, I realized that I had absolutely no plan for myself.
The house was vibrating with noise. My parents had invited what felt like half of Wake County to celebrate my younger brother Evan’s college graduation. The air conditioning was fighting a losing battle against the body heat of thirty relatives, and the air was thick with the smell of slow-cooked pulled pork, cheap cologne, and sweet tea. My Aunt Linda was laughing her shrill, piercing laugh in the corner, clutching a glass of white wine while my cousins chased each other around the dining table, narrowly missing the deviled eggs my mother had spent three hours piping perfectly. I was standing near the sliding glass door, nursing a lukewarm soda, watching Evan. He looked good. He had that fresh, unburdened look of someone who had never really been told no. He was wearing a crisp button-down shirt that my mother had ironed for him, and he was holding court near the television, recounting a story about his final exam week. Everyone was listening. Everyone was smiling.
“Attention, everyone. Attention, please.” My father’s voice cut through the din. Frank Foster did not ask for silence; he commanded it. He stood by the fireplace, a glass of bourbon in his hand, his face flushed with the kind of pride that always seemed to stop just short of including me. The room went quiet. The cousins stopped running. Aunt Linda stifled her laugh.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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