He’d found another job, but it paid less.
And less doesn’t go very far when your lifestyle is built on more.
I also heard that Tiffany wasn’t handling the financial downgrade well.
She’d been posting on social media about embracing simplicity and finding joy in less, which, in my experience, is what people do right before they max out a credit card.
There were arguments, tensions.
The big house in Franklin was apparently feeling a lot smaller when the bills were piling up on the quartz island.
And here’s where it gets really interesting.
Remember how my parents said Chase was going to take care of them?
That was the deal.
$740,000 in exchange for future caregiving, future hosting, future gratitude.
Well, Dad’s health had started to slip.
Nothing life-threatening, but his knee had gotten bad enough that he needed surgery.
And Mom’s arthritis was making it hard for her to keep up with the house.
They needed help.
Real, physical, show-up-and-do-things help.
And Chase, from what I heard, was not showing up.
He was too busy, too stressed, too far away, too something.
The son they’d invested everything in was delivering roughly the same return as a savings bond in a recession.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a little satisfied by that.
Not happy, not gleeful, but there’s a certain grim satisfaction in watching the math not add up the way someone planned.
They bet everything on one horse, and the horse was currently struggling to make his truck payment.
Meanwhile, I was in the best shape of my life, personally, professionally, emotionally.
I had a therapist who was helping me understand myself better than I ever had.
I had a wife who loved me without conditions.
I had a business that was thriving because I’d built it with my own hands.
I had employees who respected me because I treated them like people, not tools.
I had friends. Real ones, not the kind you keep because they’re attached to family obligations.
I had everything I needed, and none of it had come from my parents.
Then, on a Wednesday night in late March, my phone rang.
I looked at the screen and saw two words I hadn’t seen in eight months.
Mom calling.
I let it ring, watched it go to voicemail.
Then I set the phone on the kitchen counter and stared at it like it was a grenade with the pin half out.
Paige walked in, saw my face, saw the phone, and said, “Who?”
“Mom.”
She leaned against the doorframe and crossed her arms.
“You going to listen to it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
She was right.
I was always going to listen to it.
Not because I missed them, although honestly, some small part of me did, but because I needed to know what had finally made them pick up the phone after eight months of silence.
Eight months of not calling, eight months of not texting, eight months of not driving 20 minutes across town to knock on their son’s door and say, “Hey, we need to talk about that will.”
I played the voicemail on speaker.
Mom’s voice was shakier than I remembered.
She sounded older somehow, like eight months had aged her five years.
“Austin, honey, it’s Mom. I know it’s been a while, and I know things were said that probably shouldn’t have been said, and I know you’re upset, and I just… I just really need to talk to you. Your father’s knee surgery is coming up, and we could really use some help around the house. And, well, there are some other things we should probably discuss. Please call me back. I love you.”
I replayed it twice.
Not because I missed anything, but because I wanted to make sure I’d heard what I thought I heard.
And I had.
There was no apology in that message.
No acknowledgment of what they’d done.
No “we were wrong.”
Just “things were said” and “you’re upset” and “we need help.”
Classic, classic Lindsay Brennan playbook.
Rewrite the conflict as a mutual misunderstanding.
Frame my justified anger as me being emotional, and then slide the real ask in at the end like it’s an afterthought.
Oh, and by the way, we need someone to take care of us.