They were on the outside.

I was on the inside.

To understand why that iron gate meant so much to me, you have to know what happened two nights earlier.

And to understand that, you have to know where I’d been living for the past year.

My name is Leah Brennan. I’m twenty-eight years old.

I’m a graphic designer. I run my own small studio. It’s really just me and a laptop and a list of clients. Mostly small businesses. A bakery logo. Menus for a taco place. Labels for a woman who makes candles in her garage. Packaging for a little coffee company called Fourth Street Roasters. Websites. Brochures. Whatever pays.

It’s not glamorous. But it’s mine. I built it from nothing after I quit my job at an ad agency four years ago, and I’ve never missed a rent payment.

Until the rent stopped being up to me.

Thirteen months ago, the building I’d lived in for five years got sold to a developer. They were turning all the units into condos. Everybody got sixty days’ notice.

I looked everywhere. Every apartment I could afford had a waiting list, or wanted first and last month’s rent plus a deposit, all at once, which I didn’t have saved up yet.

My mother called me the second week.

“Come home,” she said. “Just for a few months. Until you find something. Save up. Your old room’s just sitting there.”

I didn’t want to. I want to be honest about that.

I hadn’t lived with my parents since I was eighteen. There were reasons for that. Reasons I’d spent ten years not thinking about too hard.

But I was tired, and scared, and running out of time.

So I said yes.

My parents live in a big gray colonial house in a nice suburb, with a three-car garage and a lawn my father mows himself every Saturday in perfect diagonal stripes.

My father, Gregory, is a regional sales director for a medical device company. He’s tall and loud and handsome in the way that men in commercials for retirement accounts are handsome. He likes to be in charge. Of everything. Of the TV remote. Of the thermostat. Of the conversation at dinner.

My mother, Karen, doesn’t work. She’s on the boards of two charities and the homeowners’ association. She’s small and pretty and very careful about how things look. She uses one voice with my father and me, and a completely different voice with guests and doctors and the people from church. Soft. Reasonable. Concerned.

I grew up learning to tell the difference.

The first week I moved back in, my father sat me down at the kitchen table.

“Since you’re living under our roof,” he said, “we’ll need to talk about contributions.”

“Of course,” I said. “I want to help.”

So we agreed. I’d transfer them six hundred dollars every month. I’d buy my own groceries, and some for the house. I’d pay part of the internet and the utilities, since I worked from home all day and used them more than anyone.

I paid for everything else myself. My phone. My health insurance. My medical bills. My software subscriptions, which cost more than people think. My car. My gas. My business expenses.

Every month. On the first. Automatic transfer.

But whenever my parents wanted something from me, that wasn’t the story they told.

“We’re carrying you right now,” my father would say at dinner, in front of my aunt, or a neighbor, or my mother’s friends from church. “But that’s what family does.”