By the third year, it felt less like a favor and more like a life I hadn’t agreed to, though no one had ever said the word permanent out loud. Love, I’d been taught, meant stretching quietly: more groceries, more noise, more shoes by the door, more bills I paid without comment. I kept telling myself it was temporary, that gratitude would come back around, that I wasn’t disappearing so much as expanding. It all held—until the afternoon his mother, standing in the kitchen she didn’t pay for, quoted a price to watch our son for thirty min… Continues…
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