I Flew In to Surprise My Son for His Birthday—and Found Him Sleeping in an Airport Parking Lot with His Twin Boys. By the Time the Sun Set, the Story He’d Been Silenced Under Started Falling Apart.

He stared at the steering wheel, his throat working. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

We moved the boys into the terminal café once they woke, bought them breakfast they ate quietly, too quietly, like children who had learned that drawing attention could be dangerous. Andrew told his story in fragments at first, pieces falling out between long silences. Then, as if something in him gave way, it all came spilling out at once.

His wife, Rebecca, had convinced him to sign temporary control of their shared accounts during what she called a “stress period,” had involved her parents under the guise of help, had slowly reframed his exhaustion and anxiety as instability. By the time he realized what was happening, the house was no longer his, the startup he had built with my initial investment was no longer in his name, and a court order kept him from going anywhere near the life he thought he still had.

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