“Are you injured?” I asked, irritated. “Do I need to take you to the hospital?”

“Fit as a fiddle,” he muttered.

“So you what? Just crashed it and ran?”

He didn’t answer me, and I kicked the footboard of the sofa. “Dad!”

He sat up slowly, wincing. “All right, all right. You have my attention. Happy?”

I glared at him.

“It wasn’t me,” he said. “It was Annabel. I wasn’t even there.”

I dropped my arms. “You lent her the car?” I stood there, my mouth agape. “Why the hell would you give it to her? She was probably high! And her license is suspended!”

“You don’t need that government-issued nonsense to drive,” he said, waving me off. “That’s just Big Brother’s way of making money off us for something a ten-year-old could do. What’s next? Mandatory GPS trackers in our brains that we’ll have the privilege of paying yearly fees for? Human barcodes? No thank you.”

I stared at him. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

“Why would I be kidding? And I didn’t give her the car,” he said, rubbing his lower back. “She took it.”

“Without permission?”

He squinted up at me. “She’s a grown woman, Vanessa. She hardly needs my permission to leave the house—”

I gawked at him. “Wow. Just wow.” I shook my head, incredulous. “You know what? I’m done. You’re getting your shit together, Brent’s getting a job, and she’s going into rehab and not living here anymore until she does, do you understand me?” I jabbed a thumb into my chest. “I pay this mortgage. I make the payments on that car she just crashed. It’s registered under my name. I pay the insurance on it and the maintenance and now the repairs. And I do it so that you can get your life together and maybe Brent can have a way to get to a job if he ever decides to get one, not so Annabel can use it to endanger the general public. If you three think I’m going to enable this…this bullshit by continuing to fund it, you’ve lost your minds.”

I started snatching empty soda bottles off the coffee table and clutching them to my stomach. “She could have killed someone,” I said, fuming, bottles clinking against one another. “You’re lucky all she did was wrap it around a tree.” I stopped and glared at him. “Did she take money? And don’t lie to me.”

He looked indignant. “You cut her off. How else is she supposed to eat?”

“How much?” I demanded.

He waved a dismissive hand around. “Maybe a few twenties. And my phone,” he added. He bobbed his head. “And…”

I waited.

“Your mother’s wedding ring.”

Fucking fucking UGH!

I threw up my arm and stomped to the kitchen. I wanted to destroy something. Break a plate. Take a baseball bat to this whole fucking disgusting house.

He followed me as I dumped the bottles in the trash. “You know, it wouldn’t hurt you to have a little compassion for your sister,” he said to my back. “Addiction is a disease. And a mother deserves to see her child.”

I whirled on him. “I have compassion. That’s why I’m doing everything in my power to get her into treatment. And if you loved her, you’d be helping. She needs boundaries, Dad. There have to be consequences. And if you don’t give them to her, then you’re part of the problem.”

His scruffy jaw set.

I gave him my back and started to rage-wash dishes. “You know, just once I want to be the one to fall apart. I’m so tired of cleaning up everyone else’s mess.”

The garage door off the kitchen opened. Brent came in.

He lived with his boyfriend, Joel, and his family in the house across the street. He probably saw my car in the driveway and he needed something, as usual. God knows neither of us ever came to this hellhole just because.

“So, the princess has returned,” he quipped.

I shot him a look. “You’re on thin ice, Brent. Do not test me. And you have a lot of nerve blocking me from a phone I pay for, by the way.”

He scowled around the kitchen and balled a sweater-covered hand over his nose. “Ugh, this place smells so bad. Anyway, I wanted to talk to you—”

I scoffed. “Of course you do. What pyramid scheme do you want money for this time?”

He made an indignant huffing noise. “First of all, it is not a pyramid scheme. It’s an actual business and I get to be my own boss. I just need an initial investment to build my inventory.”

“Great. Another MLM. Even better.” I slammed a plate into the drying rack. “I’m not giving you a dime, Brent. You have a business degree. Get. A. JOB. A real one.”

“I am not cut out for the traditional workforce, Vanessa, you know this! I hate everyone, food service is gross, and I’m not built for manual labor,” he whined.

Dad stood somewhere behind me. “Your brother is a budding entrepreneur, and all he’s asking for is a little start-up money.”

“Oh yeah? Then you give it to him.”

“This family takes care of each other,” Dad said, going on unfazed. “It’s what we do. I took care of you and your sister when your mother died. Annabel and you took care of Melanie, and now you’re taking care of us. It’s the Price way. If we don’t have each other, what else do we have?”

“You took care of us?” I laughed indignantly. “Is that what you call it?”

“Look at you. You turned out great!” he bellowed from behind me.

I slammed another plate angrily into the drying rack. “How dare you call your ‘fend for yourself’ parenting anything other than what it was. No money, our clothes smelling like mildew so we got bullied at school, nothing but expired food in the pantry. You bringing home some moldy sofa you found on the curb so we got bedbugs in the house and we got to spend Easter at Joel’s parents’ while you fumigated—”

Brent looked at his nails. “That sofa was pretty gross…”

“That was almost fifteen years ago,” Dad said. “How long are you two going to bring up that sofa—which was a gorgeous Victorian that just needed a little reupholstering, if you want to know. And expiration dates are myths. They just want you buying food you don’t need.”