I keep a separate bank account, a secret little digital hideaway that my wife doesn’t know about, and it’s for my sister’s university tuition and the fees are a sinkhole, a gaping maw that swallows my paycheck whole and spits out only receipts, and sometimes I look at the balance after sending another chunk of change and it’s so low it feels like the air’s been sucked out of the room, like I’m standing at the edge of a cliff and the wind is just waiting to push me over. And I started it because she’s so damn smart, my sister, a real brain, and she deserves a chance to get out of this town, out of the dust and the noise and the endless cycle of barely making it, but the cost is just astronomical, a number so big it makes my eyes water, and my wife, she’s practical, she sees every dime as a future down payment on something we’ll never actually own, something that just keeps getting more expensive and further away. And I spend my days on a construction site, the sun baking my skin and the concrete dust clinging to everything, to my hair and my clothes and even my thoughts, and I see the rebar being laid and the foundations being poured, and I think about how sturdy it all needs to be, how one wrong calculation can bring the whole thing crashing down, and that’s how I feel about this secret, this fragile scaffolding I’ve built around my sister’s future, and sometimes I just want to yell it out, to tell my wife about the burden, about the weight that feels like a cinder block on my chest, but then I picture her face, the way her lips would thin into a line, the disappointment in her eyes that would be worse than any anger, and I just can’t. So I just keep building, keep working overtime, keep pushing through the aches in my back and the sting of the dust, and sometimes it feels like I’m building a prison for myself, one brick at a time, but it’s a prison with a view, a view of my sister graduating and getting somewhere better. And the irony, it’s a real kick in the teeth, because every time I see a new building go up, every time I help lay another floor, I think about how many hours, how many scraped knuckles, how many late nights went into paying for someone else’s degree, someone else’s future, and my own dreams, they’re just sort of sitting there, gathering dust in the corner of my mind like forgotten blueprints, and sometimes I laugh, a real dark, hollow laugh, because it’s either that or just lie down on the pavement and let the traffic roll over me, and I’m too tired for that kind of drama. So I just check the account again, watch the numbers shift and shrink, and wonder how much longer I can keep this up, how much longer before the whole damn structure crumbles.