My sister-in-law shoved me down six stairs, and my husband only sighed, “You shouldn’t have provoked her.” After twenty-three years of paying his debts, caring for his mother, and holding their household together, I drove myself to the ER, documented everything, and quietly made the decision none of them expected.

The instant April’s hands struck my back, I understood something with more clarity than I had felt in years. I was not thinking about whether I could save my marriage, whether Doris needed her medication organized, or whether Brandon’s business would survive another bad month. I was thinking only that I was done.

I went down the final six steps sideways. My shoulder struck the railing, my left wrist folded beneath me when I hit the entryway floor, and the side of my head caught the baseboard hard enough to leave me dazed beneath the chandelier I had paid to install twelve years earlier. For several seconds, I lay staring upward while pain moved through my wrist in hot pulses.

Then April spoke from the landing.

“Oh, stop being so dramatic. You always make everything into a production.”

My sister-in-law stood above me in leggings and a cream sweater, her ash-blonde hair pulled into a loose knot. She looked irritated rather than frightened, as if she had knocked over a lamp and resented the noise.

Brandon stood beside her.

My husband of nearly twenty-three years did not come down the stairs.

He did not ask whether I could move my wrist or whether the warm trickle near my hairline meant I needed stitches. He gave the long, exhausted sigh he had perfected over our marriage and said, “You shouldn’t have provoked her.”

At the top of the stairs, Doris appeared in her robe. My mother-in-law was seventy-nine, gray-haired and frail enough to need a cane on bad mornings, but her eyes were perfectly clear when she looked down at me.

Then she turned around and went back to her room.

Her cane tapped slowly across the hardwood.

I pushed myself upright with my good hand and touched my temple. My fingers came away damp. I was a registered nurse with critical-care certification and more than thirty years of hospital experience, so I knew exactly what needed evaluation and exactly how serious a wrist could become if swelling trapped the wrong structure.

Still, the physical injuries felt almost secondary.

I looked at the three people whose lives I had spent decades holding together and realized not one of them was coming to help me stand.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

My voice was so calm April actually looked surprised.

“For what?” she snapped.

I did not answer. Brandon had already turned toward the living room, and April followed him as though the scene were finished.

That November would have been our twenty-third anniversary.

I grew up in Illinois foster care, moving through six homes before aging out at eighteen. By the time I finished nursing school, I had learned that security did not arrive because somebody promised to love you. You built it yourself, paycheck by paycheck, license by license, night shift by night shift.

When Brandon proposed, I was thirty-one and working at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. I had savings, a strong reputation, and an offer from a hospital network in Vancouver that had recruited me after a professional conference. The salary was better, the position was more advanced, and when I visited British Columbia for a weekend interview, I fell in love with the mountains and water before my plane even touched back down in Chicago.

Three weeks after our engagement, I declined the offer.

Brandon’s family needed me.

That was how I explained it.

Doris had recently been diagnosed with hypertension and early-stage heart failure. April had returned home after a messy divorce and had no steady job. Brandon’s contracting company had debts he somehow failed to mention until after the diamond ring was already on my hand.

I believed love meant staying.

So I stayed.

For twenty-three years, I prepared Doris’s low-sodium meals, drove her to cardiology appointments, filled prescriptions, tracked her blood pressure, argued with insurance companies, and kept a medication schedule detailed enough to run a small clinic. When Brandon’s business collapsed into its second bankruptcy, I refinanced our house entirely in my name because my credit was the only one strong enough to save it.

I worked nights to cover the payment.

I paid off roughly eighty thousand dollars in Brandon’s gambling debt across eleven years because each new discovery came packaged as the last one. I paid April’s car loan when she fell behind, covered credit-card balances she promised to repay, and absorbed HOA costs she treated as somebody else’s problem.

Nobody forced me at the beginning.

That mattered.

I kept volunteering because being useful felt dangerously close to being loved.

Over time, they stopped distinguishing between the two.

Three weeks before April pushed me, I had quietly put a real-estate attorney’s business card into my wallet after researching him during the dead hours between Doris’s midnight medication and my six o’clock hospital shift. Four days before the fall, I had opened an individual checking account at a completely different bank.

I had not yet decided what I would do with either.

Apparently, some part of me already knew.

That night, I waited until Brandon was snoring before I left the house. I drove myself to the emergency room wearing sweatpants, an old navy coat, and a dish towel wrapped loosely around my wrist because I did not want anyone upstairs to hear me searching for the brace in the linen closet.

At triage, the nurse asked what happened.

“My sister-in-law pushed me down the stairs.”

She stopped typing for half a second.

“Did you fall accidentally after contact, or are you saying she deliberately pushed you?”

“She deliberately pushed me.”

The nurse’s expression changed. Not pity. Attention.

She documented everything.

The attending physician confirmed a hairline fracture of my distal radius and treated the small cut at my hairline. Staff photographed the swelling and injury for the medical record after I gave consent, and I repeated exactly what happened, including what April said and what Brandon did not do.

A young nurse with light brown hair helped secure the splint.

“We have a social worker available if you need one.”

“I’m a nurse too.”

Her hands paused.

“I figured you might be.”

I almost asked why.

Instead, I thanked her and took the discharge paperwork she placed in my good hand.

I drove home sometime after two in the morning and slept, or pretended to sleep, on the den couch.

Mostly, I made a list.

House.

Bank.

Attorney.

Employment.

Credentials.

Documents.

Passport.

The next morning, I cooked breakfast.

I brought Doris oatmeal with measured fruit and her morning medications. I washed two loads of laundry, wiped down the kitchen, and folded towels while my fractured wrist throbbed beneath its splint.

April came downstairs around ten.

“My sweater is still damp.”

“I’ll put it back in the dryer.”

“Good. And Mom’s appointment is Thursday. I can’t take her. I have plans.”

“Of course.”

I placed the sweater in the dryer.

Then I removed my apron, folded it over the chair, picked up my purse, and walked out.

My first stop was the attorney’s office on Michigan Avenue.

I placed the property deed on his desk.

“The house is entirely in my name.”

He reviewed it carefully. “Yes.”

“I want to sell it.”

He studied me over the papers. “Immediately?”

“As quickly as legally possible.”

“Are you sure?”

I looked at the splint around my wrist.

“More sure than I’ve been about anything in a long time.”

From there, I went to my new bank and redirected my hospital direct deposit. I moved every dollar that legally belonged solely to me from my individual savings into the new account.

I left the joint account untouched except for what was already there.

Two hundred forty dollars.

That was the amount Brandon had last contributed toward household utilities six weeks earlier.

Then I went to the county clerk’s office and collected certified copies of records my attorney requested. Afterward, I drove to a shipping center on the North Side carrying the fireproof document box I had hidden for years in the back of my closet.

Inside were ten years of receipts.

Doris’s uncovered medical costs.

Copays.

Specialists.

Pharmacy charges.

Insurance correspondence.

Records of household payments, loan payments, and debts tied to Brandon.

I shipped copies to my attorney.

The originals stayed with me along with my passport, nursing credentials, Canadian licensing documents, and one old piece of paper I had never thrown away.

The Vancouver offer letter.

That afternoon, I checked into a downtown hotel.

By the time Brandon noticed there was no breakfast waiting the following morning, divorce papers were sitting in the center of our kitchen table.

According to what I later heard, he laughed.

April laughed too.

Doris supposedly said, “She’ll be back within a week. Where else would she go?”

That sentence would have destroyed me once.

Instead, sitting alone in a quiet hotel room with my wrist elevated on two pillows, I looked at my passport and understood something none of them did.

I had always had somewhere to go.

I had simply spent twenty-three years choosing them instead.

Continue below

Chapter 2

I leave the house before they realize I am serious

The calls began before noon. Brandon’s first messages were angry, accusing me of humiliating him and overreacting to “a family argument.” By evening, his tone changed and he wanted to know where I was, when I planned to return, and who was supposed to take Doris to her cardiology appointment.

I answered none of them.

The second day brought pleading. The third brought threats. After that, my attorney redirected all communication through his office, and the silence on my phone felt almost unnatural.

I knew exactly what was happening inside the house.

The prepared meals would last four days if nobody wasted them. Doris’s pill organizer would run empty Sunday night. Her blood thinner had to be taken morning and evening with food, while her calcium supplement could not be taken too close to her thyroid medication. Her standing refill information was in a binder nobody but me had opened in years.

I had explained portions of the schedule before.

Nobody listened because I was always there.

Laundry would stack up. April would resent cooking. Brandon would order takeout until he looked at the joint balance and discovered there was almost nothing accessible there.

That was the moment I imagined him finally understanding this was not a tantrum.

On the fourth morning, my attorney called.

“Brandon filed a police report.”

I sat straighter on the hotel bed.

“For what?”

“He’s claiming you misappropriated money from Doris’s care funds. He’s also alleging you’re mentally unstable, possibly missing, possibly a danger to yourself.”

I actually laughed once.

“He filed a missing-person report on the woman whose divorce attorney he has already contacted?”

“Yes.”

My attorney sounded remarkably calm.

“There’s more. He went to your hospital yesterday and caused a scene in the lobby. Security removed him.”

I closed my eyes.

“He says Doris has dementia and you’ve exploited her finances for years.”

“She doesn’t have dementia.”

“I know. Her medical records know too.”

A pause followed.

“Janelle, false statements create records. Records create evidence. He may think he’s cornering you, but he’s documenting himself.”

The receipts I had shipped were already with the bank’s fraud department and legal counsel. My own financial records matched my version; Brandon’s allegations did not.

“How soon can you move?” my attorney asked.

I looked at the old Vancouver letter beside my passport.

“My flight leaves in two days.”

What Brandon did not know was that the offer from twenty-three years earlier had never entirely died.

Neither had the part of me that wanted it.

Chapter 3

Their panic turns vicious when my money finally disappears completely

I had renewed my Canadian nursing credentials every few years, quietly and almost superstitiously. I told myself keeping the license active was professionally sensible, but somewhere underneath that explanation lived the woman who had once stood in Vancouver looking across gray water toward mountains and wondered what her life might become there.

Eight weeks before I left Brandon, I contacted the health network that had originally recruited me. It had merged and changed names, but my credentials transferred cleanly, and the senior nursing role I once declined had evolved into something even better.

Human resources responded within forty-eight hours.

Interviews followed discreetly.

By the time April pushed me down the stairs, a signed offer was already waiting in my private email account.

That was why the attorney’s card had been in my purse for three weeks.

I had not planned the fall.

I had planned the possibility of finally leaving.

Brandon apparently discovered the Vancouver connection through an old college friend he used whenever legitimate solutions failed him. Somehow he learned a ticket existed in my name for a flight from O’Hare to Vancouver two days later.

He arrived at the airport unshaven and frantic, moving between departure monitors and the international gates looking for me.

I was not there.

My attorney had anticipated the possibility that Brandon would search travel records through anyone willing to bend a rule. We booked the visible itinerary, then canceled it the previous evening after alternate arrangements were confirmed.

By the time Brandon reached O’Hare, I had already crossed the border through a different route and cleared Canadian customs.

My attorney met him near the terminal.

Brandon shouted.

That part mattered because airport personnel heard him, security responded, and much of what followed was documented.

According to my attorney, Brandon demanded to know where his wife was, accused me of stealing family money, and insisted I was abandoning an elderly woman who depended on me.

My attorney listened.

Then he told Brandon exactly who I had been before marriage.

A critical-care nurse recruited internationally before I was thirty-two.

A professional fluent enough in French and medical Spanish to be useful across multiple patient populations.

A woman with savings, credentials, and an independent career before his first business failure ever reached my bank account.

He told Brandon about the receipts.

Twenty-three years of household expenses.

Years of Doris’s medical costs.

Records of his gambling debts and bankruptcies.

Records showing the mortgage had been refinanced into my name because his credit could not support it.

He also informed him that his missing-person allegations had already been reviewed and that investigators were now interested in why he had made demonstrably false statements.

Then my attorney told him something Brandon had apparently still believed he could prevent.

“The house is being sold.”

Brandon reportedly stopped shouting.

“The divorce is proceeding,” my attorney continued. “And any attempts to contact Mrs. Mercer outside counsel will be documented.”

For years, Brandon had treated my competence like background electricity—something always available, produced somewhere else, worth noticing only when it stopped.

At an airport gate I never intended to use, he finally encountered the possibility that the person powering his life had left the building.

He could not follow me into the life I had already started.

Chapter 4

Brandon hunts for me at an airport I already left

My first morning in Vancouver began before sunrise. Rain covered the windows of the furnished apartment the hospital had arranged temporarily, and beyond the gray city I could just make out the darker shape of the North Shore mountains.

I stood there holding coffee with my wrist still splinted and felt disoriented by the absence of demands.

Nobody shouted my name from another floor.

Nobody asked whether Doris’s pills were ready.

Nobody wanted a check written, a bill covered, a sweater dried, a debt forgiven, or a problem solved before breakfast.

At the hospital, the nursing director shook my hand and said, “We’ve been hoping to get someone with your background for months.”

It was a professional sentence.

It almost made me cry.

Meanwhile, my attorney handled Chicago.

Brandon attempted to delay the house sale through an emergency filing claiming marital interest and financial misconduct. Because the deed, refinancing history, and documented ownership were clear, the challenge did not hold for long. His proposed injunction was dissolved within eleven days.

The bank reviewed his accusations against me against years of statements and receipts. Instead of uncovering secret theft, they found a documented pattern of my paying expenses for his family while he contributed inconsistently.

The fraud allegations against me collapsed.

Questions about his false statements did not.

For years, I had feared confrontation because Brandon could turn any disagreement into exhaustion. He interrupted, reframed, escalated, and kept talking until I began doubting the original issue simply because I wanted quiet.

Distance removed that power.

In Vancouver, his arguments had to pass through attorneys and documents.

Paper was less easily tired.

My own divorce moved forward without the dramatic courtroom spectacle Brandon seemed to expect. There were filings, disclosures, negotiations, and long telephone calls, but no magical moment where a judge declared twenty-three years wasted.

I did not need one.

The truth was already visible in smaller facts.

The mortgage had been mine to carry.

The house had been mine to protect.

The medical care had been mine to provide.

The marriage had survived largely because I kept absorbing consequences that belonged to other adults.

Once I stopped, the system revealed how fragile it had always been.

Two weeks into my new job, I took part in morning rounds with a white-haired physician named Dr. Harper who had worked at the hospital nearly as long as I had been married. After I caught a medication interaction in a complicated case, she glanced at me over the chart.

“Good catch.”

“Thank you.”

“No, seriously. That could have become a problem.”

The sentence followed me for hours.

At home, nobody had thanked me for preventing problems.

They had simply blamed me whenever prevention failed.

Work reminded me there was another way to be needed: people could value your judgment without assuming ownership of it.

Back in Chicago, however, the household I left behind was moving toward the consequences I had predicted.

And the first serious one involved Doris.

Chapter 5

The house sells while their ignored responsibilities finally collapse completely

Doris ended up in the hospital after a hypertensive crisis. According to information that came through legal channels, she had gone several days without taking her blood thinner correctly because neither Brandon nor April knew the dosage, refill process, or schedule.

They had lived beside that pill organizer for years.

Neither had ever learned what went into it.

I wish I could say I felt vindicated.

I did not.

Doris had watched me lie injured at the bottom of her staircase and walked away, but she was still an elderly woman whose medical crisis could have been prevented by basic attention. Pointless suffering does not become satisfying simply because the person once failed you.

The attending physician documented the medication interruption, and the family was required to reorganize her care around people who were actually willing to learn it. That meant Brandon and April had to attend appointments, contact insurers, pick up prescriptions, track refills, and understand instructions they once treated as background noise.

The house sale closed without complication after the failed legal challenge.

Brandon’s car was another problem. It had been financed under credit tied primarily to me during one of his business collapses, and once payments and responsibility were untangled through the divorce, the vehicle was repossessed from the driveway.

My attorney heard about it because Brandon complained.

Apparently, the neighbors came outside to watch.

That embarrassed him more than the debt itself.

His employment collapsed next. After police officers arrived at his workplace seeking information related to the false missing-person and financial allegations, his employer concluded the situation created exposure they did not want. He was terminated shortly afterward.

April, who had spent most of adulthood cycling through brief jobs and longer periods of unemployment, eventually found part-time retail work because there was no longer anyone available to quietly cover her bills.

The three of them moved into a two-bedroom apartment in a suburb none of them had chosen.

They began fighting over medication schedules, groceries, doctor visits, insurance calls, transportation, and household chores.

In other words, they began doing the work of their own lives.

One afternoon, several months after I left, my old pharmacy called me in Vancouver.

The pharmacist sounded apologetic.

“We still have you listed as the person who coordinates Mrs. Mercer’s medication refills. Her authorization has lapsed, and the family doesn’t seem to know which clinic manages it.”

For a moment, muscle memory almost took over.

I nearly opened my calendar.

Then I stopped.

“I’m no longer the responsible party.”

There was a pause.

“I understand.”

I gave her the physician’s office number from memory.

“You can direct the family there.”

After hanging up, I sat alone in my office.

For twenty-three years, I had believed love meant preventing people from experiencing the consequences of what they refused to learn.

I understood now that sometimes rescuing adults over and over does not preserve a family.

It preserves helplessness.

I hoped Doris received the care she needed.

Then I returned to my patients.

Their lives required my skill.

They did not require me to surrender mine.

Chapter 6

Vancouver gives me back the career I once surrendered willingly

Vancouver in the fall was gray, wet, and extraordinary. Some mornings the mountains vanished behind clouds entirely; by afternoon, a strip of snow might appear above the city as if somebody had pulled back a curtain.

My colleagues treated me with a kind of ordinary respect that embarrassed me at first. They asked what I thought during rounds, remembered recommendations I made the week before, and assumed my judgment mattered because my experience had earned that assumption.

One physician told me during my first month, “The recruiting team was right to keep after you. Nurses with this level of clinical judgment are hard to find.”

She said it while reviewing a chart.

No ceremony.

Just truth.

I had to look away before answering.

For twenty-three years, I had performed the same kind of careful attention at home. I tracked complex medications, managed budgets, anticipated problems, remembered everyone’s appointments, and kept a household functioning through illness, debt, gambling, unemployment, and resentment.

Nobody there called it expertise.

They called it what Janelle does.

One Tuesday, I was changing the dressing on an eighty-one-year-old retired schoolteacher named George. He watched my hands for a while, then said, “You know, you’re the best nurse I’ve ever had.”

I smiled.

“That’s generous.”

“I’m old enough not to waste compliments.”

I laughed and finished his dressing.

Later, walking through the parking garage, the sentence returned unexpectedly.

It did not matter because I needed a stranger to tell me my worth.

It mattered because somebody who had known me only through the quality of my work had seen in weeks what the people living closest to me stopped noticing over decades.

The house sale cleared about six weeks after I arrived. After legal fees and resolution of the remaining debt connected to my credit, I had enough for a reasonable down payment on a small condominium three blocks from the hospital.

The realtor apologized because closing happened on a busy Friday afternoon and there was no celebratory handoff.

“That’s perfect,” I told her.

She gave me the keys in the parking lot.

I drove to my new building beneath light rain, rode the elevator to the fourth floor, and unlocked a door nobody else believed they owned.

Hardwood floors.

Two bedrooms.

A modest kitchen.

West-facing windows.

No medication chart on the refrigerator.

No stack of April’s unpaid bills.

No voice from another room asking whether I had fixed Brandon’s latest mistake.

I set my bag down and stood in the center of the living room.

For years, I imagined freedom would feel explosive.

It did not.

It felt quiet.

That may have been why I trusted it.

I walked to the window and watched rain blur the lights below. Beyond the city, the mountains appeared and disappeared behind clouds exactly as they had during the weekend visit twenty-three years earlier.

I thought about the thirty-one-year-old nurse who once stood in this same city considering an international career.

She had believed marriage required giving that future up.

I wanted to reach backward through time and tell her something.

Love that demands every sacrifice from one person is not stability.

It is dependency dressed as devotion.

I could not recover those twenty-three years.

But I could decide what happened to the ones still ahead.

Chapter 7

My new home proves I never needed their permission anyway

My divorce eventually became final without me ever returning to the house on Hartley Avenue. Anything I truly valued had either traveled with me, been shipped later through counsel, or existed outside objects altogether.

I did not take the jewelry Brandon once bought after particularly bad fights. I left furniture, dishes, framed photographs, and most of the clothes from the closet we shared.

Material things had kept me trapped partly because I confused accumulation with history.

The history came with me whether I wanted it or not.

Therapy helped sort the pieces.

I had spent childhood moving through foster homes where belonging could end because an adult made a phone call. That instability taught me to overvalue permanence, even unhealthy permanence. Once I finally had a husband, a house, and relatives who called me family, I became terrified of losing them.

Brandon understood that long before I did.

Maybe not consciously at first.

But over the years, “Where would you go?” became part of the structure between us.

Not always spoken.

Often implied.

I had no parents waiting with a spare bedroom. No inherited home. No family money.

They mistook the absence of a safety net for the absence of options.

The truth was almost the opposite.

I had built myself once before I met Brandon.

That meant I knew how to do it again.

My Canadian nursing license had remained active because some part of me remembered that. The old offer letter survived because some part of me could not throw away evidence of the woman I had been before marriage reduced her ambitions to family emergencies.

Even the attorney’s business card in my wallet proved leaving had begun before the shove.

April did not create my decision on the staircase.

She ended my hesitation.

Months passed.

I learned the coffee shop downstairs made terrible muffins and excellent soup. I found a walking route along the seawall that cleared my head after difficult shifts. I bought a small dining table because I liked it, not because six other people needed seats.

Nobody criticized the color.

Nobody asked what it cost.

Brandon never apologized in a way that required an answer. Communications through counsel remained focused on money, blame, property, and what he believed I had done to him.

That told me enough.

April never contacted me directly after legal boundaries were established.

Doris did not either.

I sometimes wondered whether she remembered standing at the top of the stairs.

Maybe she did.

Maybe she had rewritten it.

Either way, memory was no longer something I needed from her.

What happened remained true without their agreement.

I heard occasional updates through legal correspondence. Brandon found inconsistent labor work. April kept her retail job longer than anyone expected. Doris’s medical care stabilized once professionals and family members built a routine that did not depend on me.

That was good.

I wanted them functional.

I simply no longer wanted to be the function.

One evening, after a twelve-hour shift, I came home carrying groceries and stopped inside my doorway.

Rain tapped against the windows.

The condo smelled faintly like the cedar candle I had lit that morning.

Nothing needed immediate repair.

Nobody was waiting to accuse me of selfishness because dinner was late.

I put the groceries away and made tea.

My wrist had healed months earlier, though it still ached when the weather shifted suddenly. The small scar near my hairline had faded enough that patients never noticed it.

Those were the visible remnants.

The deeper injury healed differently.

I stopped apologizing before saying no.

I stopped explaining every decision until the other person agreed with it.

I stopped assuming usefulness was the same thing as worth.

At work, George eventually completed his wound-care course. On his final visit, he stood carefully with his cane and shook my hand.

“Don’t let this place work you too hard.”

“I’ll try.”

“I mean it. Good people always think they can carry more than they should.”

I smiled because he had no idea how precisely he had landed on the truth.

“I’m learning.”

He nodded.

“Good.”

After he left, I finished my charting and glanced toward the window. The clouds had lifted just enough for the mountains to show.

Sometimes I still think about the night I turned Vancouver down.

For years, I treated that decision as proof of love.

Now I see it more accurately.

It was a choice made by a woman who believed sacrificing a future would guarantee she belonged somewhere.

It did not.

Belonging that survives only while you pay every bill, manage every crisis, swallow every insult, and forgive every betrayal is not belonging.

It is employment without wages.

I do not hate Brandon.

That surprises people.

Hatred would require keeping him emotionally present, and I spent too many years organizing my life around his needs already.

I hope he learns to take responsibility.

I hope April does too.

I hope Doris remains medically stable and receives care from people who understand exactly what she needs.

Those hopes cost me nothing now.

They do not require access.

They do not require sacrifice.

Most importantly, they do not require my return.

A year after I left Chicago, I renewed my passport.

The clerk asked whether I had any upcoming travel planned.

“Not yet.”

I liked the answer.

For twenty-three years, nearly every plan I made depended on somebody else’s appointment, debt, mood, schedule, diagnosis, or failure.

Now the blank space ahead belonged to me.

When I reached home that evening, I placed the renewed passport in the drawer beside my nursing credentials.

Then I stood by the window and watched the last light stretch across the mountains.

Somewhere far away, the family I spent decades sustaining was learning how to sustain itself.

That was their work now.

Mine was different.

Mine was learning that I had never been the woman with nowhere to go.

I had been the woman who kept choosing to stay.

The day I finally stopped was not the day my family ended.

It was the day my own life started moving again.

The End

Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental! Thank you! 💓