At Family Dinner, My Parents Used A Forged ID To Drain My Life Savings Right In Front Of Me…

Chapter Two: The Weight of the Blood and the Bone

I was seventeen again. The smell of wet asphalt and burnt rubber filled my nose.

My parents’ sedan was wrapped around a telephone pole a mile from our house. Jessica was in the driver’s seat, sobbing, reeking of vodka and peach schnapps.

I was in the passenger seat, my forehead bleeding from hitting the dashboard. I hadn’t even been in the car when she crashed.

I’d walked down the road because she called me, screaming for help. My father arrived before the cops.

He didn’t check if we were hurt. He checked who was in the driver’s seat.

He looked at Jessica, hysterical and drunk, and then he looked at me, sober and bleeding. “Move,” he ordered.

“What?” I asked, dazed. “Switch seats, now.”

They dragged me into the driver’s seat. My mother grabbed my face, her hands cold.

She didn’t yell, and she didn’t panic. That was the most terrifying part.

She spoke to me in a soft, soothing voice, like she was explaining why I needed to eat my vegetables. “Rosalind, honey,” she whispered, wiping blood from my eye.

“Jessica has her pageant next month. She has the scholarship. A DUI will ruin her life.”

“You’re strong. You’re smart. You can handle a juvenile record. It gets sealed when you’re 18 anyway. Do this for your sister. It’s just a little sacrifice.”

They normalized it. They made destroying my future sound like a household chore, a simple act of sisterly love.

If I said no, I was the selfish one. I was the one ruining the family.

So I sat there. I took the breathalyzer, and I took the blame.

I lost my own scholarship to a top university because of the character concern on my record. I spent my first year of adulthood scrubbing toilets to pay for community college while Jessica went to parties on my parents’ dime.

I blinked, and the memory vanished. I was back in my apartment, the code blinking on the screen.

They had used my love against me then. They had weaponized my loyalty.

But they had forgotten that loyalty has an expiration date. I wasn’t the seventeen-year-old girl bleeding in the rain anymore.

I was the woman who audits cartels. I finalized the script and hit save.

The trap was armed. The gravel of the driveway crunched under my tires, sounding suspiciously like bones breaking.

I pulled up to the estate, killing the engine but leaving the lights on for a moment to illuminate the facade. My parents’ house in Connecticut was designed to impress people they hated.

It was a sprawling, faux-Gatsby monstrosity with white columns and manicured hedges. To the untrained eye, it screamed old money.

To my eye, the eye of an auditor, it screamed leverage. I could see the cracks in the stucco near the foundation.

I saw the peeling paint on the window frames that hadn’t been touched in years. The house was like them: a beautiful shell rotting from the inside out.

I grabbed my bag, checking for the laptop one last time, and stepped out into the humid night air. Linda opened the door before I could knock.

She was wearing a silk gown that looked two seasons old and smelled overpowering of lilies. It was a funeral smell, heavy and cloying, used to mask the scent of damp plaster and rising panic.

“You made it,” she said, her smile tight as a snare drum. “Come in, darling. We’ve been waiting.”

She didn’t hug me. She ushered me into the foyer where Jessica was pacing.

My sister looked like a cover model for a magazine about nervous breakdowns. She was wearing a vintage Chanel dress, but her hair was fraying at the edges.

Her eyes were darting around the room as if she expected the wallpaper to attack her. She stopped when she saw me, her eyes raking over my charcoal business suit.

“You wore that?” she scoffed, her voice shrill. “It’s a family dinner, Rosalind, not a tax audit. You look like a funeral director.”

“Hello to you too, Jessica,” I said, walking past her. “You look tired.”

“I’m not tired,” she snapped, scratching at her arm. “I’m stressed. Not that you would understand stress.”

“Your biggest problem is probably finding a parking spot at your boring office.” I didn’t take the bait.

I just walked into the dining room. The table was set with the wedding china, fine bone porcelain with gold rims that they probably hadn’t finished paying off.

But the food served on it was pathetic: a dry, store-bought roast chicken and some wilted asparagus. It was a poverty meal served on a king’s table.

Thomas was sitting at the head of the table. He didn’t stand up.

He looked smaller than I remembered, his skin gray and clammy. He poured himself a glass of wine with a hand that shook noticeably.

“Sit down,” he ordered. I sat.

I placed my bag next to my chair, ensuring the laptop was within easy reach. We ate in silence for three minutes.

The only sound was the scraping of silver forks against china. The air in the room was so thick with tension it felt pressurized, like the cabin of a plane about to crash.

Thomas dropped his fork. It clattered loudly against the plate.

“Enough,” he said. “We didn’t bring you here to talk about Grandma.”

“I figured,” I said, patting my mouth with a napkin. “The roast is dry, Dad. What do you want?”

“We need the money,” Jessica blurted out. She slammed her hand on the table, rattling the wine glasses.

“Now. Tonight.” Thomas held up a hand to silence her.

He looked at me, his eyes dead and hard. “Your sister is in trouble, Rosalind. Real trouble.”

“She borrowed money. A lot of it.” “From who?” I asked.

“Banks don’t lend to people with a credit score of 400.” “Not a bank,” Thomas whispered.

“Hard money lenders. Private investors who don’t file paperwork and don’t care about credit scores.”

“They care about collateral. We put the house up against the loan, but the interest, after it ballooned… they called the note due this morning.”

“How much?” “3.8 million,” Jessica whispered, tears finally spilling over.