I sat in the freezing conference room, watching my brother stand up as if the world had already signed everything over to him. My mother nodded along while his wife smiled like she was ready to buy a new car with someone else’s money. When he finally announced that everything was his, I did not argue. I just placed a folder on the table and asked him one question.
“Are you sure you have ever seen Grandpa’s real signature?”
My name is Ivy Harrison, and I have spent thirty-five years learning how to be invisible in a room full of people who claim to love me. The conference room at Klein and Marrow Legal Group was designed to make you feel small. It was a cavern of dark polished mahogany and leather chairs that smelled of old money and stern judgments. Situated in the heart of Holocrest, Ohio, the office had a view of the gray street below, where the late autumn wind was currently stripping the last few leaves from the oak trees. Inside, however, the air was stagnant, recycled through vents that hummed with a low, monotonous drone. It was the perfect atmosphere for a funeral of the soul, which was exactly what my family assumed this meeting was going to be for me.
I sat in the chair closest to the heavy oak door. This was my designated spot in the family geography: the seat for the stragglers, the latecomers, or the irrelevant. It was the position of the person who might need to slip out early to take a phone call that no one else considered important. To them, I was just Ivy the dreamer, the freelance commercial photographer who spent her days adjusting lighting rigs and editing shadows at Ridgeway Creative House. They saw my job as a cute hobby that somehow paid rent, not a career that required a forensic level of observation. That was their mistake. Photography had taught me how to look at a scene and see the cracks in the foundation, the forced smiles, and the tension held in a jawline. And right now, looking through my mental lens, the composition of this room was screaming with deceit.
At the head of the long oval table stood my brother, Derek Bennett. He had not waited for Mr. Klein, the senior partner and my grandfather’s longtime attorney, to call the meeting to order. Derek never waited for permission. He was the firstborn, the golden son, the man who walked into a room and sucked all the oxygen out of it simply because he believed he deserved to breathe more than anyone else. Derek was wearing a suit that I knew cost more than three thousand dollars; it was a navy blue power suit tailored to hide the slight softening of his midsection that had started when he hit forty. His hair was gelled back with military precision, and he wore a watch that caught the overhead fluorescent light every time he gestured. He looked every inch the CEO he desperately wanted to be. He stood with his hands flat on the table, leaning forward, his weight resting on his palms. It was a dominance pose he had probably learned from a TED Talk or a business seminar on how to intimidate your subordinates.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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