Chapter 3
Another laugh, crueler this time. "A CEO of what? Your imaginary company?"
"It isn't imaginary. I have fifty employees across three locations."
"Enough with the fantasies. Sarah needs this. You owe us."
"I owe you?"
"We raised you. Fed you. Kept you in our home."
"While treating me like hired help."
"You're being dramatic."
I looked down at my ticket. Flight 447 to Fort Lauderdale, departing eight p.m. I had a choice in front of me that felt, for the first time, completely clear.
"No," I said. "I'm being done."
"If you leave," my mother said, her voice dropping low, "don't bother coming back."
That threat had controlled me for fifteen years. This time it landed somewhere different, somewhere it could no longer reach.
May you like
"Then I guess this is goodbye," I said, and hung up before she could answer.
What my mother didn't know, what she had never once bothered to ask, was that Stellar Events had been hired three months earlier for an entirely different job: full-service catering and event coordination for a private Christmas Eve dinner hosted by a Manhattan socialite named Diane Whitfield, who happened to be close personal friends with Victoria Chen, and who had specifically requested Stellar Events after seeing us cater her daughter's wedding that fall. I had been planning, for weeks, to personally oversee that dinner before flying out to Florida the next morning, because Diane was exactly the kind of client worth the extra mile.
