Either way, I know what I know now. The roof was never only a roof. It was every time I was expected to climb higher while they stayed comfortable below. Every joke made at my expense and sent to an audience while I was still working. Every favor treated as obligation. Every debt invented to keep me in position. Every version of love that turned out, on examination, to be leverage.
When that ceiling came in during the midnight rain, it was not just their bedroom that gave way. It was the whole structure we had all been pretending was sound.
And the thing that still surprises me is this: when it finally collapsed, I was not underneath it.
I had already left.
I paid what I needed to pay to draw a clean line. I closed the door. I built something quieter and more honest with the person who actually stays beside me.
