The silence on the call was heavy as my father asked if I had really dragged the building management into our private family business. I told him that they were the ones who dragged the building into it when they showed up at the leasing office demanding a key.
My mother started to cry and accused me of weaponizing the system against my own blood, but I realized that they had been weaponizing guilt against me for years. I told them that none of them would have access to my codes or my keys ever again and that the matter was not negotiable.
“I became a father,” I said when my mother asked what had happened to the old version of me who was always so easy to get along with. I told her that Leo was learning from what I allowed and that his safety mattered more to me than their convenience or their travel plans.
I left the meeting and blocked Tiffany’s number for the night because I knew she would try to vent her rage through a series of nasty texts. The silence that followed was almost physical, and I realized that my apartment felt quiet in a way that it had not felt since before the divorce.