My name is Kyle Brennan. I’m thirty-three years old, a senior accountant at a mid-sized firm in Portland, and I know exactly where every dollar goes—both mine and my clients’. For the last decade, most of my dollars have gone to the same place: funding my younger sister’s life and subsidizing my parents’ vision of what family loyalty should look like.
Not in the warm, generous “big brother helping out” way that people imagine when they hear about siblings supporting each other. More like I’d become the quiet emergency fund everyone forgot to thank, the reliable backup plan they never bothered to treat like an actual person with his own life and his own child to raise. I kept telling myself it was temporary—one more bill, one more “just this once,” and maybe my parents would finally look at me the way they looked at Amber.
Maybe they’d notice my son Jake the way they noticed her three kids. Maybe I’d stop feeling invisible in my own family. Jake is nine years old.
He’s gentle, a little shy, the kind of kid who holds doors open for strangers and says “excuse me” even when no one’s listening. He has sandy hair that never quite stays combed, freckles across his nose, and a habit of adjusting his glasses when he’s nervous—which is often, because anxiety runs in both sides of his family tree. His mother left when he was two, and it’s been just the two of us ever since, navigating life in a small two-bedroom apartment with mismatched furniture and a fridge covered in his drawings.
Jake doesn’t ask for much. He doesn’t demand the latest gaming console or expensive sneakers or elaborate birthday parties. He just wants to feel included, to be seen as part of the family the way his cousins are.
And every time we visit my parents’ house, I watch him shrink a little more when he realizes he’s being treated like an afterthought while Amber’s children—Madison, Harper, and Connor—are celebrated like champions for achievements that range from legitimate to completely manufactured. So when Amber called in late December, her voice bright with performative pride, announcing that all three of her kids had straight A’s on their report cards, I did what I always do. I said, “That’s amazing, Amber.
You must be so proud,” and I swallowed the part of me that wanted to ask why I was already bracing for the inevitable financial request that would follow this announcement like thunder after lightning. My father didn’t even pretend to frame it as a request. He called that evening and talked like the decision had already been made in a meeting I wasn’t invited to attend.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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