I took out student loans that would haunt me for the next decade, worked three part-time jobs during school, and survived on ramen noodles and determination.
Tyler, now thirty-two, worked for Dad’s company as a senior project manager—a title that meant he showed up around ten in the morning, took two-hour lunches, and left by three to go golfing. He made six figures, lived rent-free in my parents’ renovated guest house, and drove a $70,000 BMW they’d bought him for his thirtieth birthday. The guest house alone was three thousand square feet, with a full kitchen, two bedrooms, and a view of the mountains.
Meanwhile, I rented a cramped six-hundred-square-foot apartment in a building that should have been condemned years ago. The heat barely worked in winter, the air conditioning was non-existent in summer, and I’d killed more roaches than I could count. My fifteen-year-old Honda Civic had two hundred thousand miles on it and made a grinding noise whenever I turned left.
I worked seventy-hour weeks—not because I was building a future at the startup, but because I needed the overtime pay to make my student loan payments.
The startup folded suddenly on a Thursday afternoon. Our CEO gathered all twenty-three of us into the conference room and announced that our primary investor had pulled out. We had two weeks of severance if we were lucky.
I sat in my car in the parking lot for an hour calculating how long I could survive without income. Six weeks, maybe seven, if I only ate once a day.
That Sunday, at our mandatory weekly family dinner, I told everyone about losing my job.
Tyler actually laughed, spraying beer across Mom’s pristine white tablecloth.
“Maybe this is the universe telling you to find a real job,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You could be Dad’s secretary. You’d be good at that—organizing files and making coffee.”
Mom nodded enthusiastically, her pearl necklace catching the light from the chandelier.
“Oh, that’s a wonderful idea. You could answer phones at the company. You have such a pleasant voice, and you’d be so good at organizing Tyler’s calendar. He’s so busy with all his important projects.”
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