If I did well, it was the bare minimum.
If Clara did the bare minimum, it became proof of her brilliance.
I stopped trying to win their love in high school.
Not because I was healed, but because I was tired.
I put myself through college with scholarships, tutoring work, campus jobs, and a level of discipline that bordered on punishing.
I studied computer science because I liked the logic of it.
Computers, unlike people, do not pretend.
Something works or it doesn’t.
Something breaks for a reason.
By twenty-nine, I was earning six figures and leading major projects at a company whose name my parents loved to casually mention to other people while still acting unimpressed to my face.
That was always their pattern.
They diminished me privately and borrowed status from me publicly.
Clara, meanwhile, drifted through her twenties without urgency.
But then she met Eli Whitmore.
Eli came from one of those polished families who make wealth look hereditary in their posture alone.
His father owned several commercial properties and sat on nonprofit boards.
His mother hosted fundraisers.
Eli himself was not arrogant, at least not in the way I expected.
