And now, sitting at a table in my restaurant, she had missed me.
I kept my expression neutral.
My father unfolded his arms and leaned forward.
“Derek is being made partner at Hollis Group next month,” he said. “Do you know what that means for this family?”
I said nothing.
“It means we’re moving into a different position,” he continued. “Socially. Professionally. We need to present ourselves appropriately. Derek and Cassandra are looking at a house in Ardsley Park. A real house.”
He paused to let that land.
“We need some help bridging the gap.”
There it was.
“What kind of help?” I asked.
“A loan,” my mother said quickly, like she had been waiting to deliver her line. “Just to help with the down payment. Derek’s partnership bonus comes in six months. It would all be paid back by then.”
“How much?”
My father named the number.
“Sixty thousand.”
I let the silence sit for a moment.
Outside the window, a couple was walking along the river. The woman laughed at something, and the man reached for her hand. I watched them for just a second.
“I don’t think that’s something I’m able to do,” I said.
My father’s expression shifted.
“You own a hotel, Maya. Don’t tell me you don’t have sixty thousand dollars.”
“What I have or don’t have isn’t really the point.”
“Then what is the point?”
I looked at him steadily.
“The point is that the last significant financial transaction between our family and me involved forty-two thousand dollars for my college fund being used without my knowledge or consent. I built everything I have since then entirely on my own without support from this family. So when you ask me to loan sixty thousand dollars for Derek’s house, I think you can understand why the answer is no.”
My father’s face went red.
My mother pressed her lips together.
Cassandra had stopped looking at her phone.
“That was years ago,” my father said. “You’ve clearly done fine.”
“I’ve done fine because I chose to,” I said. “Not because of anything that came from this table.”
He leaned forward.
His voice dropped to the register it used to drop to when I was in trouble as a child. The one designed to make me feel small.
“You want to talk about choices? You chose to cut off your family. You moved back to the city and didn’t say a word to us. You’ve been here, what, two years? And we had to find out from a colleague of Derek’s that our own daughter owns a property downtown. How do you think that feels?”
“I imagine it feels something like finding out your college fund had been emptied without anyone telling you,” I said.
