I said no to babysitting my brother’s kids. So he dumped them in a taxi to my address anyway—except he got the address wrong. I was reviewing the security footage from my doorbell camera when my blood ran cold.
On the screen, clear as day, was my brother Derek in the Colorado afternoon light, pulling his three kids out of a yellow taxi, handing the driver cash, and walking away as the cab started to roll forward with the children still inside. The timestamp was four days old. My phone had been dead that entire weekend while I was camping in Rocky Mountain National Park, cut off from everything.
Derek had told the driver my address—except he’d given him the wrong street. Those kids never made it to my door. And now Detective Morrison from the Boulder County Sheriff’s Department was calling me about Derek.
Three weeks before that sickening discovery, I’d actually thought I had my life in suburban Denver more or less figured out. My name is Jarvis Thompson, I’m thirty-two, and I work as a software engineer for a tech company in downtown Denver, Colorado. After years of therapy, I’d finally started setting boundaries with my family—especially with my older brother, Derek.
He called me on a Thursday evening while I was debugging code for an important client presentation. His voice had that familiar edge to it, the one that always meant he wanted something. “Jarvis, I need you to watch the kids this weekend,” he said.
No hello. No small talk. My stomach tightened.
Tyler was eight, Emma was six, and little Sophie had just turned four. Sweet, funny, bright kids. But Derek had been using me as his free, on‑call babysitting service for years.
“Derek, I can’t,” I said, staring at the lines of code on my laptop without really seeing them. “I’ve got a massive deadline on Monday. I’m not prepared to watch three young kids for an entire weekend.”
“What do you mean you can’t?” he snapped.
“You always watch them.”
That was the problem. I always did. Every time Derek wanted to disappear for a weekend, every time he had a so‑called “business opportunity” that was really a poker game, every time he just didn’t feel like being a father, he dropped his kids at my doorstep.
Sometimes with notice. Sometimes without. “I’m saying no, Derek,” I told him, forcing the words out.
“I have my own life and responsibilities.”
Silence on the other end. A hard, offended silence. Then came the explosion.
“Are you kidding me right now? After everything I’ve done for you? Remember freshman year of college when you got caught with beer in your dorm?
Who convinced the RA not to report you? Remember when Mom and Dad were going to cut you off for dropping pre‑med? Who talked them down?”
Here it was.
The guilt‑trip express, right on schedule. Derek had been holding that college incident over my head for fourteen years. One time he’d helped me, and somehow that had turned into a lifetime debt I was apparently never allowed to finish paying.
“Derek, that was fourteen years ago,” I said quietly. “Since then I’ve watched your kids at least fifty times. I’ve paid for their school supplies, their soccer uniforms, their birthday parties when you forgot.
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