My son served me up as the punchline to his friends, and the wave of their derisive laughter was the last sound I heard before something inside me finally shattered for good.
For years, I endured the death by a thousand paper cuts. The eye-rolls when I talked about my work, the condescending remarks about my “spreadsheets and stuff,” the casual contempt from a boy living a life funded entirely by the career he found so embarrassing.
He saw his father, a teacher, as noble. He saw his friends’ parents, surgeons and tech CEOs, as titans.
I was just the glorified administrator whose job, in his words, a monkey could do. A walking ATM who provided the house, the private school tuition, and the ski trip money without the decency to have a cool job title.
He had no idea I was about to teach him the difference between price and value using the coldest, sharpest weapon I had: a single, folded piece of paper from my “boring” job.
The Thousandth Cut: The Smell of Burnt Congratulations
The garlic bread was burning. I could smell the acrid scent of scorched butter and parsley from the dining room, a fitting aroma for the evening. We were supposed to be celebrating. Liam, my seventeen-year-old son, had just gotten his early acceptance letter to Georgetown.
My husband, Mark, was beaming, his face lit with the kind of pure, uncomplicated pride I couldn’t quite access. He raised his glass of Merlot. “To Liam! Future titan of industry, or politics, or whatever he decides to conquer.”
Liam, lounging in his chair with the calculated nonchalance of a teenager who knows he’s the center of attention, gave a small, practiced smirk. “Probably something in finance. Something with… tangible impact.”
He let the words hang in the air, a little grenade lobbed directly at me. I slid my gaze from the blackened bread in the kitchen to my son. He knew exactly what he was doing.
“That’s wonderful, honey,” I said, my voice tight. I run the commercial underwriting department for one of the largest insurance firms in the Midwest. My impact is tangible in nine-figure liability policies that keep entire corporations from collapsing, but to Liam, my work was a universe of beige cubicles and meaningless paperwork.
Mark, ever the peacemaker, jumped in. “Your mom’s work has impact, Liam. It’s complicated stuff.”
Liam waved a dismissive hand, not even looking at me. “Yeah, I know. Spreadsheets and stuff. It’s just… not the real world, you know?” He looked at his father, his intellectual equal. “It’s not like what you do, Dad, shaping young minds. Or what I want to do, shaping the market.”
The implication was clear. My job was a placeholder. A necessary, but embarrassing, function. The burnt smell wasn’t just the bread; it was the scent of my patience charring at the edges.
A Career in Beige
My office isn’t beige. It’s a corner suite with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Lake Michigan. The glass is tinted a cool blue, and on clear days, I can see the curvature of the earth. I don’t tell Liam this. He wouldn’t be impressed by the view; he’d be disappointed by the lack of a rock-climbing wall or a kombucha tap.
My job isn’t “spreadsheets and stuff.” It’s a high-stakes poker game where the chips are shipping fleets, downtown skyscrapers, and pharmaceutical patents. I read geotechnical surveys of soil composition for billion-dollar construction projects. I analyze actuarial data on hurricane frequencies to insure coastal refineries. I assess the political stability of foreign countries to underwrite corporate assets held there.
My team and I are the silent architects of stability. We are the reason a factory can be rebuilt after a fire, the reason a surgeon can perform a risky operation, the reason a company doesn’t go bankrupt over one catastrophic mistake. It’s a world of immense, complex, and invisible responsibility.
I once spent three weeks wrestling with a policy for a new satellite constellation. The math was brutal, the risk factors astronomical—literally. I came home drained, my brain feeling like a wrung-out sponge. Liam had glanced up from his phone and asked if I’d had a “super exciting day alphabetizing files.”
I didn’t correct him. I didn’t know how. How do you explain the adrenaline rush of mitigating a 0.5% probability of a $500 million loss to a kid who thinks value is measured in Instagram followers and app-store rankings? To him, my victories were silent and my language was jargon. My career was a long, droning dial tone.
The Weight of a Paycheck
Later that night, as I loaded the dishwasher, Mark leaned against the counter. The scent of burnt garlic still lingered.
“You were quiet tonight,” he said, his tone gentle. He knew. He always knew.
“He’s getting worse,” I said, not looking at him. I scrubbed at a stubborn piece of cheese on a plate. “The comments. The eye-rolls. It’s like he’s ashamed of me.”
“He’s not ashamed, Sarah. He’s a kid. He’s trying to sound smart.” Mark is a high school history teacher. His patience for the performative idiocy of teenagers is practically infinite. Mine was wearing dangerously thin.
“It’s not just sounding smart, Mark. It’s contempt. He thinks what I do is meaningless because it’s not flashy. Because I don’t ‘disrupt’ an ‘industry.’ I just quietly keep the one we have from falling apart.”
He sighed, coming over to wrap his arms around me from behind. “His world is all about that—the noise, the spectacle. His friends’ parents are surgeons and tech CEOs. It’s a lot of pressure.”
“And I’m the one who pays for the private school where he feels that pressure,” I said, the words sharper than I intended. The sentence hung between us. It was the truth we rarely spoke aloud. Mark’s teaching salary was noble, but it didn’t cover the mortgage on this house or the tuition at St. Alban’s Prep. My “boring” job did. All of it.
“That’s not fair,” he said softly.
“I know.” I leaned back against him, the anger deflating into a familiar exhaustion. “I just wish, for once, he would see it. See me.”
A Study in Contempt
A week later, Liam cornered me in the hallway. He had that specific look on his face—the one that meant he needed something.
“Hey, Mom.” He shifted his weight, avoiding eye contact. “So, the senior ski trip is coming up. It’s eight hundred dollars. Plus gear.”
I crossed my arms, my gaze steady. “That’s a lot of money.”
“Yeah, I know. But everyone’s going. It’s like, the last big thing before graduation.” He finally looked at me, a flicker of entitlement in his eyes.
I thought about the hours I’d put in that week, the tense negotiations with a reinsurance broker in London, the mental gymnastics of a multi-layered liability policy. All of it, a quiet hum of effort in the background of his life, manifesting as an eight-hundred-dollar ski trip.
“Okay,” I said, my voice flat. “I’ll transfer it to your account.”
He visibly brightened. “Awesome. Thanks, Mom.” He turned to leave, his mission accomplished.
“Liam,” I said, stopping him. He turned back, impatient. “You understand where that money comes from, right?”
He frowned, confused by the question. “Yeah. From your job.” He said the word ‘job’ like it was a slightly embarrassing medical condition.
“From the spreadsheets and the paperwork,” I added, unable to stop myself.
A flicker of understanding, and then annoyance, crossed his face. He knew what I was doing. He rolled his eyes, a gesture so practiced it was almost elegant. “Yeah, Mom. Whatever. Thanks for the money.”
He disappeared into his room, leaving me alone in the hallway. It was death by a thousand paper cuts, and I was starting to bleed out.
The Echo Chamber: The Sound of Friends
Liam’s friends were over. I could hear their voices from the kitchen, a low thrum of adolescent bravado. There was Caleb, whose father was a well-known cardiothoracic surgeon. There was Noah, whose mother had just sold her software startup for a figure that had been whispered about in the local paper. And there was Ben, whose family was old money, the kind that didn’t need to talk about jobs at all.
They were in the living room, allegedly studying for a physics final, but the conversation I could overhear was a performance. It was a verbal jousting match of parental achievements.
“My dad’s doing a triple bypass tomorrow on some diplomat,” Caleb announced, as if he’d be scrubbing in himself.
“My mom’s flying to Zurich for a tech conference,” Noah countered, name-dropping the keynote speaker.
I heard Liam’s voice, a little too loud, a little too eager to compete. “We’re looking at a summer place in the Hamptons. My dad’s been wanting to get a place to really decompress from the school year.”
He didn’t mention that the down payment for that hypothetical house would come from a trust my father left me. He didn’t mention that my annual bonus was the only reason a place like that was even a remote possibility. He framed it around his father, the teacher. The noble profession. The one that sounded good in this echo chamber of ambition. I stayed in the kitchen, slicing apples with more force than necessary, each thud of the knife on the cutting board a punctuation mark in my rising irritation.
A Proposition in the Den
The boys had been “studying” for three hours, which meant the recycling bin was now full of energy drink cans and the snack pantry was decimated. Liam found me in the den, where I was trying to review a policy draft.
“Hey,” he started, hovering in the doorway. “Can we order a few pizzas? We’re getting kind of hungry.”
“I thought you guys ate everything in the house,” I said, not looking up from the document. The language was dense, full of exclusions and riders. It required absolute focus.
“Yeah, well. Teenage boys, you know.” He gave a weak laugh. “It’s cool if I use your card, right? I’ll just order it on the app.”
I sighed, finally pulling my eyes from the page. He was already holding his phone, his thumb hovering over the food delivery app. He didn’t see my work as work. It was just a thing I did that could be interrupted at any moment for pizza. To him, my desk was just a convenient flat surface in the house, my time an infinitely available resource.
“Fine, Liam. Just get two. Not five.”
“Cool. Thanks.” He was about to leave when he paused. “Hey, so, we were thinking of having a few more people over Saturday night. Not a party party. Just a get-together. Like, ten or fifteen people.”
I stared at him. A get-together of fifteen teenagers was a party. “I don’t know, Liam. Mark and I were planning on a quiet night.”
“Oh, come on, Mom,” he wheedled. “We’ll be responsible. It’s the end of the semester. We just want to hang out.” His eyes pleaded, but there was a steeliness underneath. It wasn’t a request; it was an expectation. My house was a backdrop for his life, and I was the stage manager who was supposed to make sure the props were in place.
Collateral Language
Against my better judgment, I said yes to the Saturday get-together. Mark had convinced me it was better to have them here, under our roof, than somewhere else. I spent the day pretending to be the cool, relaxed mom, while my stomach twisted itself into knots.
I was carrying a bowl of chips from the kitchen to the living room when I overheard a conversation from the back porch. The sliding door was open just a crack, and the voices carried on the cool night air. It was Liam and Noah.
“This is a sick house, man,” Noah said.
“Yeah, it’s alright,” Liam replied, his voice taking on that familiar, dismissive tone. “My mom’s really into the whole suburban comfort thing.”
“What does she do again?” Noah asked. “You never really say.”
There was a pause. I held my breath, the bowl of chips heavy in my hands.
“Oh, you know. Office stuff. She’s like, a glorified administrator or something at some big, soul-crushing insurance company,” Liam said, followed by a short, sharp laugh. “She basically pushes paper all day. I don’t think she’s spoken to another human being who wasn’t on a conference call since 2005.”
The words landed like stones in my chest. A glorified administrator. It wasn’t just a misunderstanding of my job; it was a willful, malicious re-branding. It was designed to make me sound small. Insignificant. It was the language he used to his friends to create distance between his cool, promising future and my beige, paper-pushing present.
I backed away from the door silently, my face burning. I put the chips on the counter and stood there for a long moment, my hands gripping the cold granite until my knuckles were white.
The Quiet Before the Laughter
An hour later, the house was buzzing. Music thumped from a Bluetooth speaker, a low, persistent heartbeat. The group had swelled to twenty kids who were scattered across the living room and the back deck. I felt like a stranger in my own home, a caterer at an event I hadn’t planned.
Mark was in his element, chatting with a few of the kids about their college plans, making them laugh. He was the cool dad. I was the mom who replenished the pretzel bowl and silently collected empty cups.
I saw Liam holding court in the center of the living room. He was animated, confident, the king in his castle. He caught my eye as I walked past, and for a split second, he looked away, a flicker of something—guilt? annoyance?—in his expression. But it was gone as quickly as it appeared, replaced by the easy smile he gave his friends.
I told myself to let it go. To breathe. This was just a phase. He was posturing. It wasn’t personal. But it felt intensely personal. Every dismissive glance, every condescending explanation of my life to his friends, was a tiny chisel chipping away at my composure.
I retreated to the kitchen, the designated neutral zone. I leaned against the counter and took a deep breath, trying to find a moment of peace in the rising tide of noise and resentment. A few of the kids were in there, talking by the fridge. One of them, a girl I didn’t recognize, smiled at me politely.
“This is a really nice party, Mrs. Henderson.”
“Thanks,” I managed a smile.
It was then that Caleb, the surgeon’s son, walked in. “Hey, Liam was just telling us you work in insurance. My uncle is a broker. What do you do, exactly?”
The question was innocent. But I saw Liam appear in the doorway behind him, his expression a mixture of panic and preemptive embarrassment. The quiet moment was over. The stage was set.
The Detonation: The Punchline Was Me
The kitchen fell quiet. All eyes turned to me. Liam hovered in the doorway, a nervous energy radiating from him. He wanted to shut this down before it went any further. Before his friends found out his mom’s job wasn’t easily summarized in a flashy, one-sentence bio.
“I’m a senior underwriter,” I said to Caleb, my voice even. “I manage the department that assesses and prices risk for large-scale commercial policies.”
Caleb nodded, looking intrigued. “Oh, wow. So, like, really complex stuff.”
Before I could answer, Liam let out a short, forced laugh from the doorway. He stepped into the room, draping a casual arm over Caleb’s shoulder, turning the moment into a performance.
“Don’t let her fool you with the fancy title,” he said, winking at the small crowd. “It’s basically just paperwork. A monkey could do it, if you taught it how to use Excel.” He looked around the room, gauging their reaction, seeking validation in their smiles.
A few of the kids chuckled uncomfortably. Noah snickered. Liam’s smile widened. He had them. He had successfully reframed my career as a joke.
He wasn’t done. “Seriously, her biggest professional crisis of the year was when the printer ran out of toner. It was a whole thing.” He gestured dramatically. “Memos were sent.”
And then came the laughter. It wasn’t just a few chuckles this time. It was a wave of it. Caleb, Noah, the girl by the fridge—they all laughed. It was the kind of relieved, derisive laughter teenagers use to solidify their own social standing at someone else’s expense. And the expense was me. My son had served me up as the punchline.
In that moment, something inside me didn’t just crack; it shattered. The years of quiet frustration, the constant, low-grade humiliation, the feeling of being unseen in my own home—it all coalesced into a single, blinding point of white-hot rage. I looked at my son, laughing along with his friends, and I didn’t see my child. I saw a stranger who held me in utter contempt.
A Walk to the Abyss
I didn’t say a word. I turned my back on the laughing hyenas in my kitchen and walked out. My movements were calm, deliberate. On the outside, I was a placid lake. On the inside, a nuclear reactor was going into meltdown.
I walked down the hall, the sound of their laughter echoing behind me, each peal a physical blow. I passed Mark, who was coming out of the bathroom. He saw my face and his smile faltered. “Sarah? What’s wrong?”
I just shook my head and kept walking, my destination clear. My home office. My sanctuary. The place where I did my meaningless, paper-pushing work.
Inside, I closed the door, shutting out the noise of the party. The silence was a relief. I stood in the dark for a moment, my heart hammering against my ribs. I could play this one of two ways. I could let it go, swallow this latest indignity like I had all the others. I could cry. I could scream into a pillow. I could wait until the party was over and have another pointless, circular argument with Liam that would end with him rolling his eyes and me feeling defeated.
Or I could do something else. I could burn it all down.
The thought was terrifying and exhilarating. Was it the right thing to do as a parent? Absolutely not. A good parent would take the high road. A good parent would use this as a teachable moment, filled with calm discussion and mutual understanding. But the woman standing in this office wasn’t a good parent right now. She was a professional who had just been publicly ridiculed by the person she had sacrificed the most for.
The ethical considerations were a distant hum. My internal compass was spinning wildly, but every magnetic pull was pointing in one direction: retaliation. He wanted to talk about the “real world”? Fine. I was about to give him the most real-world lesson of his life.
The Paper Cut
My hand was shaking as I turned on my desk lamp. The warm glow illuminated the neat stacks of files, the leather-bound blotter, the framed photo of a smiling Liam in a Little League uniform. I pushed the photo face down.
I opened the top right drawer of my desk. It was my “personal” drawer, where I kept things like checkbooks, stamps, and my most recent pay stubs. I found the one from the 15th. It was printed on plain white paper, folded into thirds. It felt flimsy, insignificant. Just another piece of paper.
I unfolded it. The document was a dense block of text and numbers. Gross pay. Federal tax. State tax. 401(k) contribution. Health insurance deduction. Net pay. It was the clinical, unglamorous anatomy of my professional life.
My eyes landed on the number next to “Gross Pay, YTD.” Year to date. We were only in May. The number was already well into six figures. It was a staggering, almost obscene amount of money for pushing paper. For a job a monkey could do.
Holding it, I felt a strange sense of power. This wasn’t just a pay stub. It was evidence. It was a rebuttal. It was a weapon, forged in the quiet hum of my office, sharpened on the whetstone of my son’s contempt. There was no poetry in it. No nobility. Just the cold, hard, irrefutable logic of capitalism. A language I knew my son, the aspiring titan of finance, would understand perfectly.
I folded the paper carefully and slid it into the pocket of my jeans. The edge of the paper was sharp against my knuckles. A paper cut. How fitting. I took one last look around my quiet, boring office, then turned and walked back toward the laughter.
The Price of Everything
I re-entered the kitchen like a ghost. The laughter had subsided, but the boys were still giddy, high on their own cleverness. Liam was leaning against the counter, a triumphant smirk on his face. He saw me and his smirk faltered, replaced by a look of defiance.
I walked to the center of the room, right into their circle. I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t have to. The sudden shift in my demeanor was enough to command their attention.
“You know, Liam,” I began, my voice dangerously calm. “You’re right. My job is just paperwork. It’s boring. There’s no glory in it.”
Liam shifted uncomfortably. He knew this wasn’t an apology.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the folded pay stub. I held it between my thumb and forefinger.
“But I’ve always believed that if you’re going to mock something, you should at least understand its value.”
I let my eyes travel over his friends—Caleb, Noah, all of them. Then I looked directly at my son. His face had gone pale.
I gently unfolded the paper and laid it flat on the kitchen island, right next to the half-eaten bowl of chips. I slid it across the granite until it stopped in front of him.
“You said anyone could do my job,” I said, my voice as crisp and cold as the numbers on the page. “So, my question is this: If anyone could do it, why do I make more in a month than most of your teachers, including your father, make in a year?”
The silence that followed was absolute. It was a vacuum, sucking all the air and swagger out of the room. Liam’s friends, their faces a mixture of shock and morbid curiosity, leaned in to look at the paper.
I heard a low whistle from Noah. Caleb’s eyes went wide.
Then came the new sound. It started as a snort from Ben, then a choked giggle from Caleb. Within seconds, his friends were howling. It wasn’t the kind laughter from before. This was the laughter of sharks that have smelled blood in the water. They weren’t laughing with my son anymore. They were laughing at him.
I watched as the color flooded Liam’s face, a violent, blotchy crimson. He stared at the pay stub as if it were a venomous snake. He looked up at me, his eyes filled with a horrifying cocktail of shame, fury, and utter betrayal. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. He knew everything, and he knew nothing. He knew the price of everything, and the value of nothing. And in that moment, under the harsh fluorescent lights of my kitchen, he was learning the difference.
The Fallout: The Sound of a Shut Door
The laughter died down, replaced by an excruciatingly awkward silence. Liam’s friends suddenly found the floor fascinating. Noah cleared his throat and mumbled something about having to get home. Caleb was already backing toward the door. The party was over.
One by one, they filed out, a procession of embarrassed teenagers, avoiding my eyes, avoiding Liam’s. Within five minutes, the house was empty, save for the three of us. The half-eaten pizzas sat on the counter like sad, greasy monuments to the evening’s disaster.
Liam still hadn’t moved. He stood frozen by the kitchen island, his back to me. I could see the tension in his shoulders, the rigid set of his spine. The pay stub was still sitting on the counter.
Mark finally broke the silence. He walked over and picked up the piece of paper, glanced at it, and then folded it neatly. He didn’t look at me. His face was a mask of disappointment.
“Liam,” he said softly.
Liam flinched. Without a word, without looking at either of us, he turned and walked out of the kitchen. We listened to his heavy footsteps on the stairs, followed by the definitive, echoing slam of his bedroom door. It was a sound of finality. A sound of severance.
I stood there, my own rage finally ebbing away, leaving behind a cold, hollow dread. The victory I had felt just moments before now tasted like ash in my mouth. I had won. I had utterly, completely, and publicly vanquished my son. And I had never felt more like a loser.
A Debate in the Rubble
The silence in the kitchen stretched on, thick and suffocating. Mark was methodically starting to clean up, throwing paper plates into the trash with sharp, angry movements.
“Was it worth it?” he finally asked, his back still to me.
The question wasn’t an accusation; it was a genuine inquiry, which somehow made it worse.
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly, my voice barely a whisper. “Ask me tomorrow.”
He turned around, his face etched with a weariness that went beyond the late hour. “He was wrong, Sarah. What he said was arrogant and cruel and he deserved to be called out on it. But that? In front of his friends? That was a public execution.”
“He has been executing me in public for years!” I shot back, the defensiveness rising in my throat. “Little comments, eye-rolls, jokes at my expense. He needed a shock to the system. He needed to understand that my ‘boring’ life is the platform he launches his from.”
“There are other ways to teach that lesson,” Mark argued, his voice rising to match mine. “Ways that don’t involve weaponizing your salary to humiliate your own child. You know what his friends are going to say at school on Monday? You just handed them a lifetime supply of ammunition to use against him.”
He was right. I knew he was right. I had seen the look on their faces—the predatory glee. I had traded my son’s respect for the fleeting, ugly thrill of revenge. The ethical lines I had blurred in my office now seemed like gaping chasms in the light of the kitchen.
“He backed me into a corner, Mark,” I said, my voice cracking. “I just… I snapped. He looks at me with such disdain. I wanted him to see me. For once.”
“He saw you,” Mark said, his voice softening with a profound sadness. “But I’m not sure what he’ll see when he looks at you from now on.”
A Knock on a Locked Future
The next day was a tomb. Liam didn’t emerge from his room. Not for breakfast, not for lunch. I could hear him moving around in there, but the door remained firmly shut.
Around three in the afternoon, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I walked upstairs and stood outside his door, my heart a nervous drum against my ribs. I could smell the stale air of teenage angst seeping from under the door.
I knocked softly. “Liam? Can we talk?”
Silence.
“Liam, please. I… I want to talk about last night.”
More silence. I leaned my forehead against the cool wood of the door. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, though I wasn’t sure he could hear me. “My reaction was… it was too much. I was angry. I shouldn’t have done that in front of your friends.”
I waited, listening for any sign of life, any response. Nothing. It was like talking to a wall. A wall he had built, brick by resentful brick, and I had just mortared the last one into place myself.
I slid down to the floor, my back against his door, and just sat there in the silent hallway. I thought about the pay stub. A document meant to represent value, and I had used it to devalue the most important relationship in my life. The numbers on that page had built this house, paid for his education, and funded his future. But they couldn’t buy back his trust. They couldn’t unlock this door.
A Different Kind of Paperwork
Weeks passed. The chill in our house was a permanent weather system. Liam was a ghost. He was polite, in a cold, distant way. He said “please” and “thank you.” He did his chores without being asked. But he didn’t look at me. He spoke to me only when necessary, his words clipped and functional. The easy banter, the arguments, the life—it was all gone, replaced by a tense, fragile truce.
Mark said it would take time. He was playing mediator, a weary diplomat shuttling between two hostile nations. I had apologized again, and Liam had given a curt, dismissive nod that was somehow more painful than if he had yelled at me.
Then one Tuesday evening, I was in my office, finishing up for the day. My office door, which I now kept open, creaked. Liam was standing there, leaning against the frame. He had a textbook in his hand.
“Hey,” he said, his voice quiet.
“Hey,” I replied, my heart giving a hopeful leap.
He gestured vaguely at the papers on my desk. “Is that… one of the policies you work on?”
I was so surprised I could barely speak. “Uh, yeah. It is. It’s for a new biotech firm. They’re developing a pretty radical gene therapy.”
He was quiet for a long moment, his eyes scanning the dense text from across the room. I could see the gears turning in his head.
“So… you have to understand the science, then?” he asked. “To, like, know what the risks are?”
“I have to understand enough to ask the right questions,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “And I have to understand the financial models to know what it’ll cost if those risks become realities.”
He nodded slowly, his eyes finally meeting mine. There was no warmth in them, not yet. But the contempt was gone. In its place was something new. A flicker of reluctant curiosity. A dawning, complex understanding.
He didn’t apologize. And I didn’t ask him to. He just said, “Oh. Okay,” and walked away.
It wasn’t a resolution. It wasn’t a happy ending. But it was a start. I looked down at the complex, boring, vital piece of paper on my desk. The work wasn’t over. I had a different kind of paperwork to do now—the slow, painstaking, and entirely necessary job of underwriting the risk to my own family, of rebuilding something I had so carelessly broken.
About the Author
