Chapter 7 - THE CRACKING GOLDEN CHILD
By Wednesday morning, the winter sky over Chicago had turned an ominous, bruised purple, dumping three inches of slush onto the pavement. Copper Table was an eerie tomb of plywood and yellow tape. A specialized biohazard and restoration crew worked under industrial floodlights, hauling out the mangled steel tables and scraping Beverly’s red spray paint off the brickwork.
I stood in the center of the kitchen, wearing heavy rubber boots and a thick wool sweater, holding a clipboard with the replacement equipment manifest.
The door opened with a dull rattle of plywood.
Briana stepped through the gap.
She looked unrecognizable. The glamorous, curated influencer from social media had vanished. She wore an oversized gray hoodie, no makeup, flat winter boots, and a puffer jacket that looked five years old. Her face was hollow, her eyes sunken with dark rings, her hands stuffed deep into her pockets.
She stood at the perimeter of the yellow crime scene tape, looking at the smashed refrigeration unit.
"Joel said I could find you here," she said, her voice barely audible over the hum of the dehumidifiers.
I didn't lower my clipboard. "Joel had no right to invite you onto a secured crime scene."
"He didn't invite me," Briana said, swallowing hard. "He just told me where you were. I came because... because the police came to my apartment this morning."
I flipped a page on my clipboard. "Detective Miller served you with a grand jury subpoena, didn't he?"
"Yes," Briana whispered, a fresh tear spilling down her cheek. "He said if I don't sign a complete cooperation agreement and hand over every laptop, phone, and financial record for B-Luxe Media by Friday, the state will charge me as a co-defendant with Mom and Dad."
"Then you should probably go home and start packing your electronics into boxes," I said, my tone flat, devoid of any warmth.
Briana flinched as if I had struck her across the face. She stepped across the yellow tape, her boots crunching over the dried glass on the floor.
"Simone, please stop talking to me like a stranger!" she cried, her voice cracking with desperation. "I’m your sister! I know I was stupid! I know I was vain and selfish and believed everything Dad told me! But I didn't want this! I never wanted your kitchen to be destroyed! I loved coming here... remember when you made my graduation cake?"
I stopped. I lowered the clipboard and looked at her.
"You didn't graduate, Briana," I said quietly. "You dropped out after one semester. I made that cake because Mom lied to our extended family and told everyone you had earned an associate degree, and she begged me to make a three-tier red velvet cake so she wouldn't be embarrassed in front of Aunt Clara."
Briana froze, her face flushing crimson.
"That has been your entire life, Briana," I continued, taking a step toward her. "A series of manufactured lies designed to protect your delicate ego, paid for by other people's labor. You didn't ask where the money came from because you didn't care. As long as you had a VIP table at the club, as long as you could post pictures of a thousand-dollar handbag, you didn't care if Douglas bled his pension dry. You didn't care if I worked sixty hours a week while you slept until noon."
"I was twenty!" Briana sobbed, dropping her head. "They raised me to be this way! Dad told me every day that you were born to be a worker, but I was born to be a star! He told me that you were rigid, that you didn't understand ambition, that you were jealous because I was pretty and free!"
"And you believed him because it excused you from being a decent human being," I said.
Briana sank down onto an overturned plastic milk crate, burying her face in her hands, her shoulders heaving with violent sobs.
"They're going to prison, aren't they?" she whispered through her fingers.
"Dad is seventy. Mom is sixty-eight," I said, looking at the ruined wall where Lily's drawing had hung. "Given the value of the damage, the commercial burglary charge, and the identity theft, the mandatory minimum for Class 1 felonies in Illinois is four to fifteen years. Even with a plea deal, Dad is looking at three years in a state facility. At his age, that’s an eternity."
"And what happens to me?" Briana asked, looking up, her eyes wide with childlike terror. "The landlord at Elm Street gave me an eviction notice yesterday. Apex Bridge froze the B-Luxe account. I have four hundred dollars in my personal checking account, Simone. I have nowhere to go. Mom and Dad’s house in Naperville is being seized by the county for back property taxes. I have nothing."
I stared at my sister. The little girl who had received the car with the ribbon while I rode the bus to the grocery store. The girl who had laughed when our mother called me "the dependable one."
A part of me—the old, conditioned part of me that had been trained since childhood to fix every disaster—wanted to reach out, pull her up, and tell her she could sleep in our guest room until she found a job.
But then I looked at the concrete floor.
I looked at the black scorch mark where Douglas had tried to smash the commercial gas line, a move that could have leveled the entire city block if the emergency shutoff valve hadn't held.
"You're thirty years old, Briana," I said, my voice hardening into stone. "When I was thirty, I had two degrees, forty thousand dollars in student debt, an infant child, and an eighty-hour work week between auditing clients and prepping catering orders in a rented basement."
Briana looked at me, realizing with sudden, crushing finality that the safety net had been completely removed.
"You're going to sign the cooperation agreement with Detective Miller," I told her. "You're going to surrender your luxury clothes, your electronics, and your car lease. You're going to move into a studio apartment in a neighborhood you can afford, and you're going to get an entry-level job at a retail store or a diner."
"Simone... please... you have a guest bedroom... just for a few months..." she begged, reaching toward my coat.
"No," I said, stepping backward. "You will never set foot in my home, Briana. You will never be alone with Lily. You watched our parents forge my signature on a document that would have bankrupted my family, and you didn't dial my number until the police were knocking on your door."
"I was scared!"
"You were complicit," I said. "If you want to survive, learn to work. If you don't, go to jail with Douglas and Beverly. That is the only choice you have left."
May you like
I turned my back on her, picked up my clipboard, and walked toward the back prep area where the contractor was waiting.
Briana sat on the milk crate for five minutes, her quiet weeping echoing through the hollow, ruined kitchen. Then, slowly, she stood up, wiped her face with the sleeve of her oversized hoodie, and walked out through the plywood door into the Chicago winter.
