“We were a team when I was ‘parenting’ her,” I countered. “We were a team when I was the one making sure she didn’t fail out of school and the one keeping the peace. But you dissolved that team last night. You made me ‘the help.’ And ‘the help’ doesn’t pay for the employer’s daughter to live like a princess.”

Just then, the front door burst open. Ashley hadn’t even gone to class; she had driven straight from the gas station to our house in a state of high-octane panic. She marched into the kitchen, her expensive boots clicking aggressively on the floor I had just waxed the day before.

“What is going on?” she demanded, ignoring me and looking straight at her father. “My Starbucks app won’t reload, my card is dead, and the insurance company just sent me a text saying my policy is pending cancellation. Dad, fix it!”

Greg looked at her, then back at the papers in his hand, then at me. He looked like a man who had been told the gravity he relied on had suddenly been switched off.

“Ashley, honey, sit down,” Greg said, his voice lacking its usual authority.

“I don’t want to sit down! I have a hair appointment at eleven and they have a strict cancellation fee!” She turned her glare toward me, her lip curling in that way that always made me feel small. “Is this you? Are you doing this? You’re so petty. Just because I told the truth last night? You are just the help. You just prove it by acting like a child when you don’t get your way.”

I didn’t flinch. I didn’t even get angry. I looked at this girl—someone I had spent three years trying to love, someone whose broken heart I had mended after her first college breakup, someone I had stayed up late with helping her study for finals—and I felt nothing but a profound sense of relief. The tether had been cut.

“Ashley,” I said, standing up and placing my mug in the sink. “I’m not a child, and I’m certainly not your mother. I’m the owner of this house—the one my parents left me, and the one I pay the taxes on. I am also the person who has been paying your bills because I thought we were building a family. But your father informed me that I am an outsider. So, as an outsider, I’ve decided to stop donating my hard-earned money to a stranger who treats me with contempt.”