I watched the numbers on the screen. The new offer. It was a good one, really, on paper. More than I ever thought I’d see for myself, a first-gen kid from… well, let’s just say the kind of place where a raise was a laugh, a cruel joke told by a foreman with a cigarette dangling. My parents, God rest their souls, they moved mountains with their hands, not with spreadsheets. Decades of it. Calloused fingers, backs bent, the kind of weariness that seeps into your bones and stays there. And not once, not a single solitary time, did either of them ever ask for more than what was offered. The idea… it would have been an absurdity. A kind of mental aberration, really, to even conceive of such a thing. They just… accepted. Like the weather. Or gravity. And there I was, a marketing associate, for heaven's sake, with my little presentation, my carefully worded demands. The words felt like sandpaper in my mouth, rough and foreign. Each sentence I uttered, a betrayal. Not of the company, mind you, they’re just cogs in a bigger machine. No, it was a betrayal of a legacy. A whole lineage of quiet endurance. It felt like I was spitting on their gravestones, somehow, this act of… self-advocacy, they call it now. Like a child pointing at the moon and demanding it be brought down. My mother, she used to say, “Be grateful for what you have, because someone always has less.” And I truly believed her. Still do, I suppose. The raise came through, of course. It always does, when you learn the game. A comfortable sum, enough to make life easier, to fill the cracks that always seemed to appear in our floorboards back then. But it came with this… weight. Like a stone tucked into my pocket. A kind of existential guilt, perhaps. Like a differential diagnosis, almost. This profound cognitive dissonance. I won, they say. I negotiated well. But all I could feel was the ghost of my father’s hands, eternally grimy, the smell of grease and sweat, and the knowledge that they never even dreamed of asking for the extra pittance that was rightfully theirs. What a laugh, huh? The irony of it all… it sometimes makes me chuckle in the dark, a dry, bitter sound.