My therapist would later call it “narrative preservation.” Mom would rather be homeless in her own mind than accept she wasn’t the martyr she claimed to be.
At the time, I just felt… done.
Keith called me a few days later.
His voice sounded different—lighter, in a way that suggested he’d made a decision that freed something in his chest.
“I found an apartment,” he said.
“A real one?” I asked before I could stop myself.
He laughed weakly. “A studio. Tiny. Third floor walk-up. But it’s mine.”
He told me he’d been cooking for himself for the first time in his life. Watching YouTube videos. Burning pasta. Buying groceries with his own money and realizing how much he’d never learned because Mom always did everything for him.
“I started therapy,” he admitted quietly. “My therapist says I was… conditioned.”
I leaned against my kitchen counter and listened.
I wanted to scoff. Conditioned. Like he was a dog.
But then I remembered: Mom made him dependent on her. It kept him near. It kept him loyal.
Keith kept talking. “I have panic attacks sometimes,” he said. “Thinking about… all of it.”
I didn’t know what to say.
So I said the only honest thing: “I’m glad you’re getting help.”
The conversation ended awkwardly. Two siblings standing on opposite sides of a childhood canyon, trying to speak across it without falling in.
Colleen suggested therapy for both of us.
Not together. Individually. For the parts of us we’d kept buried because we needed to survive.
We met for lunch at a busy Italian place where no one cared about our conversation.
Colleen looked exhausted—dark circles under her eyes, shoulders tight.
“I’m having nightmares,” she admitted, staring at her salad like it was an enemy. “About the basement fridge.”
I nodded slowly. “Me too.”
Colleen swallowed hard. “I wake up tasting expired milk,” she whispered. “Like I’m six again.”
We sat in silence for a moment.
Then Colleen slid a business card across the table. “Gregory Potts. Trauma specialist. Evening appointments.”
I made the call right there.
My first session was a Thursday at 7 p.m., in an office that smelled like lavender and had soft lighting that made my skin itch with suspicion—comfort always felt like a trick.
Gregory was calm. Middle-aged. Kind eyes. He didn’t react with shock when I explained the basement fridge. He didn’t try to minimize.
He just said, “That was abuse.”
Hearing the word out loud made something in my chest loosen and ache at the same time.
Gregory explained how trauma lives in the body. How the brain rewires itself around survival. How smelling milk even when it’s fine can be a trauma response, not a quirk.
Later, he suggested EMDR.
In my second month, we did the memory of me at eight, throwing up on the cold tile, Mom calling me dramatic.
He had me follow a light bar with my eyes while I held the memory. Rate distress from zero to ten.
It was a nine.
Then the eye movements. The memory shifted. Not disappearing—just changing shape. I saw myself as an adult now, reaching back to that child and telling her she survived.
By the end, distress dropped to a three.
I walked out feeling like someone had removed a weight I didn’t realize I’d been carrying for decades.
The next day, Carlos told me I seemed lighter.
I didn’t explain. I just nodded, grateful for the kindness of a man who didn’t ask for my pain as proof.
Keith texted me asking if Colleen and I would meet him together.
His therapist wanted him to hear directly from us.
Colleen resisted. “I don’t owe him anything.”
“I know,” I said. “Just… one meeting. He listens. No excuses. We leave if we want.”
She agreed—one chance.
We met at a busy coffee shop downtown. Keith was already there with three coffees waiting, like he didn’t know what else to do with his hands.
He looked terrible. Like he’d aged five years in two weeks.
Colleen sat farthest from him, arms crossed.
I sat between them, coffee warming my palms.
Keith didn’t defend himself. Didn’t explain. Didn’t say “I didn’t know” immediately. He just asked, voice shaking, “Tell me what it was like.”
Colleen spoke first. Her voice was steady, but her hands trembled.
She talked about constant stomach aches that became normal. The shame at school when kids asked about her lunch smell. The feeling of being less than fresh food.
Then she said, quietly, “I developed an eating disorder.”
Keith’s face crumpled.
She talked about obsession with expiration dates. Throwing away food that was perfectly fine because her body didn’t trust safety.
I talked about the bathroom floor at eight. The cramps. The bile. The way Mom stood in the doorway and walked away.
I talked about inspecting food like a bomb technician. Smelling milk even now in my professional kitchen. Waking up tasting spoilage that wasn’t there.
Keith sat motionless, tears running down his face and dripping onto his shirt.
When we stopped, he took a shaky breath.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
Colleen’s expression stayed hard. “Sorry doesn’t fix it.”
“I know,” Keith said, voice breaking. “I just… I needed to hear it.”
He said he wanted to confront Mom and force her to admit it.
Colleen shook her head. “She won’t.”
Keith insisted he needed to try.
Two weeks later, he texted that Colleen was right.
Mom denied everything. Called us liars. Blamed Dad. Blamed money. Blamed us for being “expensive.”
When Keith pushed, Mom screamed that he was betraying her.
She told him to get out.
Keith called me afterward, voice strangely clear.
“I finally see her,” he said. “She’s not… she’s not who I thought.”
Welcome to reality, I almost said.
Instead I said, “Yeah.”
Sometimes that’s all you can offer.
Mom’s housing situation fell apart quickly.
She’d stopped paying the mortgage, apparently believing that desperation would force Colleen and me to “cave.” That we’d come running when she was truly threatened.
The foreclosure process moved faster than she expected.
An investor bought the house at auction. Mom had thirty days to get out.
Keith helped her move into the subsidized senior apartment Randolph had found. He said he couldn’t abandon her completely, but he wasn’t giving her money. Just labor. Just one last thread of humanity.
“She complained the whole time,” Keith told me. “Said you and Colleen forced her into poverty.”
I laughed once, humorless.
Mom tried one last manipulation a week after the move.
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