The Burden

Three weeks later, Aunt Margaret — my father’s younger sister, who lived only forty minutes away and often visited the kids — noticed something was off when I declined to attend the family’s end-of-month gathering, citing a work shift, even though I’d always made a point of showing up before.

She called to check in, and during the conversation, I — maybe too exhausted to keep hiding it anymore — told her the whole story: the eight years of quiet transfers, the night of the accident, the text calling me a burden.

Aunt Margaret went quiet for a long time on the other end of the line.

“You’ve been paying for them for eight years and no one in this family knew?” she asked, her voice shaking with an emotion I couldn’t quite tell was more anger or grief.

“Elena, do you have any idea how much you’ve given them in total?”

I’d never sat down to calculate it.

That night, I pulled up eight years of bank transaction history, and the number that appeared on the screen was enough to leave even me sitting in stunned silence: $360,000.

Aunt Margaret didn’t tell me right away, but I later learned that she called my grandfather that very same night.