My husband looked me in the eye and said, “Your family is your responsibility. Your income is yours, and my income is mine.” So I smiled, accepted his rule, and immediately stopped sending his family $3,000 every month. Thirty days later, they were all panicking.

If Eleanor’s weapon was guilt, Julian’s twenty-four-year-old brother, Leo, relied entirely on arrogant intimidation. Leo was a junior sales associate at a tech startup who believed that wearing four-hundred-dollar loafers and driving a leased luxury sedan made him a titan of industry. He had never owned a vehicle he actually paid for himself; I had subsidized his lease since he graduated college because Julian claimed Leo "needed to project success to close deals."

At 12:30 PM, I walked out of my downtown office building to grab lunch at a nearby salad bar. As I stepped onto the pavement, a shadow fell across my path.

Leo was standing by the curb, wearing a tailored suit that was slightly too tight, his face dark with anger. He had obviously taken an Uber downtown just to ambush me on my lunch break.

"You think you're really clever, don't you, Nora?" he sneered, stepping into my personal space, attempting to use his six-foot frame to tower over me on the Austin sidewalk. "My car is sitting in an impound lot in North Austin. The leasing agency says I’m two months behind on the payments and they’re terminating the contract. Do you know what it looks like to show up to a client lunch in an Uber X?"

I didn't step back. I looked down at his expensive loafers, then back up into his angry, entitled eyes. "It looks like you’re living within your actual income, Leo. Congratulations on joining the real world."

"You owe me that car!" he snarled, pointing a finger at my chest. "Julian promised me when I signed the lease that the family trust would cover the overhead until my commissions kicked in! You can't just cut off my funding because you're mad at my brother!"

"There is no family trust, Leo," I laughed softly, the sheer absurdity of the phrase echoing on the street. "There was just my paycheck. My sixty-hour work weeks paid for your leather seats. And since your brother informed me that I am not responsible for anyone outside my own skin, your lease is terminated. You make sixty thousand dollars a year. Go buy a used Civic."