I actually laughed, because I genuinely believed they had to be joking. “I love him,” I said. “I loved him well before the accident ever happened. I’m not walking away simply because his legs no longer work properly.”
My mother’s eyes went completely flat. “Love doesn’t pay any bills. Love won’t lift him into a wheelchair for you. You have absolutely no idea what you’d actually be signing up for.”
“I know enough,” I said. “I know he’d do exactly the same thing for me.”
She folded her hands neatly together. “Then this becomes your own choice entirely.
If you stay with him, you do it without our support. Financial, or otherwise.”
I stared at her. “You’d genuinely cut off your only child, simply for refusing to dump her injured boyfriend?”
My father’s jaw clenched hard. “We are not funding you throwing your entire life away like this.”
The fight itself went in endless circles. I yelled. I cried. They stayed calm, and genuinely cruel underneath it. In the end, my mother said simply, “Him, or us.”
My voice shook badly, but I said, “Him.”
The very next day, my college fund had vanished entirely — the account emptied out completely. My father handed me my own documents. “If you’re an adult,” he said flatly, “then be one.”
I lasted exactly two more days inside that house. The silence hurt worse, honestly, than their actual words had. So I packed a duffel bag — clothes, a few books, my toothbrush.
I stood in my childhood bedroom a long moment, looking hard at the entire life I was walking away from.
Then I left for good.
Colton’s parents lived in a small, worn house that smelled faintly of onions and fresh laundry. His mother opened the door, saw my bag, and didn’t even bother asking. “Come in, baby,” she said simply. “You’re family now.” I broke down completely, right there on their threshold.
We built an entirely new life out of nothing at all. I went to community college instead of my original dream school. I worked part-time in coffee shops and retail stores. I learned exactly how to help him transfer out of bed. How to handle catheter care properly. How to fight endlessly with insurance companies. Considerably more than any ordinary teenager should ever have to know, but I learned it anyway, out of pure necessity.
