No Place for Me in the Family Portrait

On my mother-in-law’s seventieth birthday, Lin Jiashu hired a photographer to capture three generations of the family together. I had paid four years of mortgage payments for his family, spent three years taking his mother to the hospital, and even put the birthday banquet on my salary card. But when the photographer counted heads, my name wasn’t on the list. My mother-in-law smiled as she nudged me toward the kitchen and said, “Jianyue, go check the soup first. We’ll call you after the family finishes taking pictures.” Lin Jiashu stood behind her with his sister’s son in his arms and never looked at me. On the projector screen, the photo was titled “The Lin Family Reunion,” and the spot where I had been standing had been cropped into a money tree. Ten minutes later, I canceled the automatic mortgage payment and called the bank. If they thought I didn’t look like family, then I would settle accounts like an outsider. Later, they called me heartless in the relatives’ group chat and demanded to know how family could count every penny so precisely. I posted the smart-lock records, the mortgage statements, and the video in which they had said, “Let the family take the picture first.” After that, the only activity left in the chat was a string of deleted-message notices.