By my twenty-first birthday, my mother had started charging me $450 every month for room and board. I paid it from my paycheck, even though they locked me out of my own bedroom whenever Ellie visited. Grant had proposed, and Ellie had become a regular guest at our family table. One evening, I finally asked my mother what Ellie thought about me. She didn’t hesitate. Ellie believed I lived in Charlotte, had a job there, and was too busy to come home. “Don’t make me a liar, Bryn,” my mother said. I finally understood why Ellie never asked about me. My family had invented another life for me because they were ashamed of the one I was actually living.

I built a life outside that house anyway. I found work at a large garden center on Russell Parkway and became an expert on shrubs, trees, and perennials. Contractors began asking for me by name. During weekends away, Hattie taught me to graft peach trees, joining one tree’s cutting to another’s rootstock so they could grow together. I learned to recognize the living layer beneath damaged bark. But at home, I continued making myself smaller. When my grandmother died, I stood behind a pillar at her funeral while Ellie and her parents sat with my family. Later, I read the obituary and discovered it listed one daughter and one grandson. My name wasn’t there.