Chapter 2
This was the rhythm I'd grown up inside. Evan destroyed something. My mother excused it. My father enforced the cleanup. And I absorbed the cost in a corner nobody looked at twice.
But I had stopped being quiet three weeks earlier, the day a different kind of fear finally outweighed the old one.
They didn't know I'd already sat across from an attorney named Marcus Webb in a downtown office with a view of the river, sliding him a folder of screenshots, voicemails, and a timeline going back six years. They didn't know my medical savings had quietly moved out of the joint family-linked account my father still technically had viewing access to. They didn't know every threatening text and every "family meeting" disguised as an ambush had been archived and dated. And they certainly didn't know my phone was sitting in the pocket of my hoodie, recording, the way it had been recording for the last three family dinners in a row.
My father stood. His chair scraped hard against the floor.
"Sign the transfer."
"No."
May you like
His eyes went flat, the particular flatness I'd been trained since childhood to fear more than anything else in that house.
My mother whispered, "Don't make your father angry."
