The apartment smelled like burnt toast and impending failure. It was one of those mornings where the air felt too heavy to breathe, thick with the humidity of a radiator that wouldn’t quit hissing and the frantic energy of three children who had woken up choosing violence.I stood in the center of the kitchen, the linoleum peeling up at the corners like a sunburn, and pressed my palms against my eyes. I am Lily. I am twenty-nine years old. And if you looked at my bank account, you would think I was a magician, because making three kids survive on my waitress tips was nothing short of a sleight of hand.Emma’s voice shattered my moment of peace. She was six, and in her world, the absence of dehydrated marshmallows was a Greek tragedy.

Ezoic
“I did not!” Josh yelled back from the living room. He was eight, and he was a terrible liar. “It was Max!”

Max, for the record, is four. Max was currently doing laps around the coffee table in his Superman underwear, roaring like a Tyrannosaurus Rex that had just consumed a dangerous amount of sugar.

My phone buzzed on the counter, vibrating against a stack of unopened mail. I didn’t need to look at it to know what it was. It was Thursday. Thursday meant the rent reminder text from the landlord, a man who had as much compassion as a parking meter. It probably also meant a low-balance alert from the bank.