People think they know me because they saw a thirty–second clip on the local news or scrolled past a headline with my name jammed between outrage and emojis. Cold–Hearted CEO Throws Parents Out Onto the Street. Ice–Queen Millionaire Evicts Her Own Family.
It makes for great clickbait, I’ll give them that. A woman in a glass house on a cliff, her parents in handcuffs at the gate—it’s practically designed for the algorithm. Strangers decided a long time ago that I was the villain in that story.
It’s easier that way. It means they never have to ask how a daughter gets to the point where closing the door on her parents feels less like cruelty and more like survival. The real story doesn’t start with police lights bouncing off my windows.
It doesn’t start with my brother screaming on my driveway or my mother sobbing into the cameras she once pretended not to notice. It starts in a small blue Craftsman on a quiet street in Tacoma, Washington, in a kitchen that always smelled like burnt coffee and drywall dust. My father, Robert James, owned James & Son Contracting long before there was enough money to pretend we were anything but one bad invoice away from disaster.
The “Son” painted on the side of his white pickup truck wasn’t some generic promise to the future. It was my brother, Caleb. From the time we were little, everything in our house orbited around that name.
“Someday this will all be yours,” my dad would say, thumping Caleb on the back hard enough to slosh his orange juice. “We’re building something here, son. Legacy.”
Legacy.
It sounded big and shiny when I was nine, sitting at the kitchen table doing my math homework while my mother scraped dried grout off my father’s hands. To my dad, it meant the business. To my mother, it meant appearances.
To Caleb, it meant he could do no wrong. Caleb was the kind of boy small towns are built to adore. Blond from the sun, not a bottle.
Quarterback by junior year. He had that lazy half–smile that made teachers forgive late assignments and neighbors forget broken windows. When he walked into a room, my parents lit up like someone had just flipped on the stadium lights.
When I walked into a room, they saw chores. “Aubrey, grab plates.”
“Aubrey, take your brother’s jacket.”
“Aubrey, don’t be so sensitive.”
I learned early that there were two sets of rules in our house. There was the world Caleb lived in, where mistakes were “boys being boys” and consequences were something the adults quietly handled behind closed doors.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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