He didn’t storm out; he slipped away like someone leaving a cult at dawn, terrified the spell might drag him back. The drive to his new apartment felt unreal, the highway lights streaking past like all the years he’d lost to “just this once, Mike” and “you’re the only one we can rely on.” In the quiet of that bare room, his phone lit up with messages—first confusion, then guilt-laced concern, then anger. Not one of them asked how he felt; they asked what he planned to do about the mortgage, about Jake’s job search, about “abandoning your family when we need you most.” Therapy didn’t give him new memories, just a new language: enmeshment, scapegoat, golden child, financial abuse. Each word slotted into place like a label on a cabinet he’d been fumbling through in the dark. As his parents scrambled, selling furniture and blaming the economy, as Jake raged about “unfairness” while refusing every job beneath him, Mike realized the house had never been a home—just a machine that ran on his guilt and payche… Continues…