Nonna was in that room. Renata was in that room. I was twelve, traumatized, and vastly more invested in the candy.

My mother was the guardian of this treasure. It was meant to cover my essential needs as I matured, and whatever crumbs remained would be handed over to me on my twenty-fifth birthday.

No one ever mentioned a specific number.

But secrets, I was about to learn, have a specific gravity. And the heavier the secret, the louder it crashes when it finally falls.

Chapter 2: The Gospel of Debt

Barely thirteen months after we buried my father, Renata married Royal Busby.

Royal was a boisterous man who owned a lucrative landscaping empire. His surname was plastered in bold, green font across a fleet of heavy-duty trucks roaming the county. He came as a package deal with his eleven-year-old daughter, Kirsten, a girl who possessed her own actual pony—a concept so staggeringly glamorous to my grieving mind that it felt pulled from the pages of a fantasy novel.

We were quickly uprooted from our modest life and transplanted into Royal’s domain in Glen Allen: a sprawling, brick colonial fortress boasting a three-car garage and a front lawn manicured with the obsessive precision of a PGA golf course.

I tried to acclimatize. But the economic physics of the Busby household became glaringly apparent within months.

Kirsten was enrolled at Holy Rosary Academy, an elite Catholic institution requiring crisp plaid skirts, mandatory chapel attendance, and exorbitant fees for the varsity rowing team. I, on the other hand, was sent to the overcrowded public high school a mile down the highway. Kirsten upgraded from a pony to competitive equestrian jumping lessons, which naturally segued into a ten-day cultural immersion trip to Italy with her Latin class.

During those years, Renata developed a relentless, weaponized catchphrase. She deployed it so frequently that my cousins and I used to mockingly mouth the words behind her back at family barbecues.