The air was warm but not brutal yet, the sky doing that soft orange-purple thing Arizona does when it’s deciding whether to turn into an oven.
I heard footsteps on the gravel behind me and turned.
Cassie stood there, holding two plastic cups of punch.
“Thought you might need this,” she said, handing me one.
“Thanks,” I said. “How’s it going in there?”
She nodded toward the house. “Jordan cornered a councilwoman and made her listen to a five-minute speech about financial literacy in public schools,” she said. “Leah’s talking to a rep from the hospital system about a statewide rollout. Adam’s trying to pretend he’s not thrilled that a mid-tier bank recognized his logo.”
I snorted. “So, business as usual.”
We stood shoulder to shoulder, looking at the house.
“This place feels different,” she said softly. “Lighter.”
“Sometimes I walk in and expect to hear Dad yelling about the TV volume,” I admitted. “Then I see Priya threatening to take away grant money if someone doesn’t submit their budget on time, and I remember we upgraded.”
Cassie laughed quietly.
“He wanted to come, you know,” she said after a moment.
My shoulders stiffened. “Dad?”
She nodded. “He saw the article about the incubator in the paper. Said it was ‘a damn circus’ and ‘overblown,’ but he circled the date on the calendar. Mom told him it would be humiliating to show up. He said he didn’t care. She won.”
I swallowed.
“Would you have wanted him here?” I asked.
She thought about it. “As your sister? No. He would’ve made it about him. As a therapist’s hypothetical exercise?” She shrugged. “Maybe it would’ve been interesting to watch his face when he realized none of this is imaginary.”
I huffed out a breath.
“He knows,” I said. “On some level. Even if he has to tear it down in his head to survive. That’s his work, not mine.”
She turned to look at me. “You sound… different.”
“More boring?” I asked.
“Less… combustible,” she said. “In a good way.”
“Therapy’s a hell of a drug,” I said.
We fell quiet again.
“Hey,” she said after a while. “There’s someone I want you to meet. She drove in from Tucson. She said your videos kept her from going back to a family that was breaking her. I told her I’d introduce her if you weren’t too people-ed out.”
I felt my usual social battery panic twitch, then settled.
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. Bring her out.”
Cassie headed back inside. I watched the door close behind her, heard the rise and fall of voices, the clink of glasses, the muted thrum of a playlist someone had queued up.
A minute later, she came back with a woman in her late thirties. Dark hair pulled into a low bun, blazer over a T-shirt that said “Cycle Breaker” in neat white letters.
“Damon, this is Monica,” Cassie said. “Monica, Damon.”
Monica extended a hand. Her grip was steady.
“It’s weird to say it to a stranger,” she said, “but… thank you.”
“For what?” I asked.
“For making a video that said it’s okay to walk away even if they’re not ‘that bad,’” she said. “I kept waiting for my parents to hit some imaginary line where I’d be allowed to leave. Then you said, ‘If you’re bleeding from a thousand paper cuts, you’re still bleeding,’ and… I don’t know. It snapped something into place.”
I remembered saying that. It had been a throwaway line at the time, a metaphor that slipped out when I was tired and honest.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I moved out,” she said. “Found roommates. Started a small consulting thing for mid-sized businesses. Applied to be part of your next cohort, actually.”
“Seriously?”
She nodded. “My odds are the same as anyone else’s. But even if I don’t get a desk, it helped to know there was a place in the world where people like me weren’t the family joke.”
Something in my chest eased.
“That was the point,” I said quietly.
Cassie watched us with an expression I couldn’t quite read—pride, maybe, tinged with something like awe.
As the sun dipped lower, casting long shadows across the yard, I realized this was the moment I’d wanted at that New Year’s Eve table all those years back.
Not the applause. Not the jaw-dropped shock.
Just this:
Proof that my existence made someone’s path a little less brutal.
Later that night, after everyone had gone home and Priya had finally let us stop stacking chairs, I walked through the house one more time, turning off lights.
Office 3—my old room—was empty, a whiteboard full of someone’s goals for the quarter, the faint smell of dry-erase marker hanging in the air.
I stood in the doorway, hand on the frame.
“If you’re in here at two in the morning,” I murmured to the ghost of my younger self, “it’s because you want to be, not because you’re trying to earn your right to exist.”
I flipped the light off.
In the hallway, my phone buzzed. A notification from the channel.
New comment on the original parasite video.
I opened it.
User: family_fallout_73
“I watched this in my car outside my parents’ house for the third time and then drove away instead of going inside. I’m sitting in a Walmart parking lot ugly crying and also feeling more free than I have in years. If you’re reading this, internet strangers, please know you’re not crazy for wanting better.”
I leaned against the wall, let my head rest back, closed my eyes.
A house in Scottsdale.
A video filmed on a Tuesday night.
A guy in his thirties who’d been called a parasite and decided to become a habitat instead.
You never know which choices are going to change your life. Or someone else’s.
I pushed off the wall, slipped my phone into my pocket, and headed for the front door.
Behind me, the house hummed quietly in the dark, full of other people’s dreams charging on their laptop batteries, incubating overnight.
For the first time, it didn’t feel like I was walking away from something.
It felt like I was walking forward.
