“I have an account,” I said. “I’ll log you in.”
A week later, I got a notification that my password had been changed. Then I saw a charge for the premium family plan. Carter had upgraded it. When I asked him, he shrugged and said, “I needed the 4K resolution for research. Filmmakers need to see the details.”
He wasn’t a filmmaker. He was a guy who watched movies until 3:00 in the morning.
It snowballed. It wasn’t just bills. It was a lifestyle subsidy.
Deborah stopped buying groceries. Or rather, she stopped buying the real groceries. She would buy bread and milk, but if we wanted dinner, she would say, “I am just so exhausted today.”
That was my cue.
I would open the delivery app. I would order Thai food or pizza or sushi for three people. Sixty dollars here, eighty dollars there. If I suggested cooking, Carter would say he had a sensitivity to gluten this week, or he was trying a paleo diet, or he just couldn’t handle the smell of frying onions because of his sensory processing issues.
So I paid.
I paid because it was easier than arguing. I paid because every time I pulled out my credit card, Deborah would smile and say, “It is so nice to have the family taking care of each other.”
But we weren’t taking care of each other.
I was taking care of them.
Then came the career investments. Carter has had five careers in the eight months I have been here. First, he was going to be a photographer. Then a graphic designer. Then a drop-shipping entrepreneur. Now it was the podcast and streaming.
Each phase required gear.
I remember coming home three months ago to find a massive package on the porch. It was a Canon camera lens, a serious piece of glass. $1,200.
My phone buzzed with a fraud alert from my bank. I walked into the kitchen, the box in my arms. Carter was eating a bowl of cereal that I had paid for.
“Oh, sick,” he said. “It came.”
“Carter,” I said, my voice shaking. “Why did I just get a charge for $1,200?”
He looked genuinely confused. “Oh. Did it use your card? My bad. It must be saved as the default on the family Amazon account. I clicked buy now so fast I didn’t check.”
“You need to pay me back,” I said.
Deborah intervened. She was wiping the counter, her back to me.
“Kayla, don’t stress him out. He has a wedding gig lined up next month. He’ll pay you back when the client pays him. You know you have the liquidity. He’s just starting out.”
The wedding gig never happened. The couple went in a different direction. The lens sat on a shelf gathering dust until he sold it to a pawn shop for $400 because he needed cash for a concert ticket.
I never saw a dime of the original $1,200.
That was the night I started the spreadsheet.
I did not do it out of malice. I did it out of a desperate need to cling to reality. I felt like I was being gaslit. I felt like I was the crazy one for thinking that $2,000 a month in incidental expenses was not normal family bonding.
I opened a file on my secure work server. I named it Project Leech at first, then renamed it to Household OPEX in case they ever saw it over my shoulder.
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