For a second I genuinely thought he was teasing me, the way he sometimes did when he wanted to see if I was paying attention. His hands were still wrapped around the handles of the carving fork, knuckles pale, veins raised like blue cords against skin that had thinned with age. The dining room smelled like browned butter and sage, and the candles on my mother’s centerpiece had burned low enough that the wax was starting to puddle.
I actually laughed.
Because the envelope my mother had pressed into my palm earlier—right after appetizers, right after she told me not to mention the amount—had a check inside for $200.
My name is Jordan Graves. I’m 31 years old, and I hunt digital thieves for a living. I’m a cybersecurity analyst for Sentinel Tech in Denver—the kind of job that means my days are made of alerts and patterns, of tiny anomalies that most people never see until it’s too late. I’ve tracked cryptocurrency fraud across seventeen countries, helped the FBI recover $4.2 million tied to ransomware, and testified in federal court four times. I know how to follow money through the darkest corners of the internet.
Turns out the biggest theft of my career was happening at my own family’s Thanksgiving table, under a chandelier my mother dusted twice a week, beside a platter of turkey she’d photographed before anyone was allowed to touch it. Three days before the holiday, my sister Olivia called. I was in my apartment in Denver, three monitors casting a bluish glow over the living room, my hoodie half-zipped, a cup of coffee gone lukewarm on the coaster. Outside my window, the city looked clean and indifferent—traffic sliding along I-25, the mountains distant and steady like they didn’t care what kind of chaos people were making down here.
I was digging into a phishing operation that had been bouncing through Estonia, the kind of scam that starts with a harmless-looking email and ends with someone’s savings evaporating. I had it paused when Olivia’s name lit up on my phone.
Her voice had that particular brightness that always made me suspicious—the tone she used when she wanted something but was pretending she didn’t.
“Hey, Jordy,” she said.
Nobody calls me Jordy except her, and she only does it when she’s trying to soften me up.
“Listen… about Thanksgiving. Maybe you should skip it this year.”
I swiveled my chair away from the screens and stared at the corner of my kitchen where the light didn’t quite reach. “Why?”
“Grandpa’s really tired lately. The doctor said he shouldn’t have too much excitement. You know how he gets when you visit. Wants to stay up talking, show you his old maps, tell those stories about Korea.”
She laughed, but it sounded manufactured, like she’d practiced it in front of a mirror. In the background I could hear something clinking—glass against glass, maybe her bracelets, maybe a wine bottle being set down. “We’re thinking a quiet holiday,” she continued. “Just the local family.”
I live in Denver. My family is in Bridgeport, Connecticut. About two thousand miles of very convenient distance.
“Since when does Grandpa want quiet?” I asked.
“Since he turned eighty-seven and his cardiologist told Mom he needs to reduce stress.”
That part might have been true. Grandpa William Montgomery Graves—decorated veteran, retired civil engineer, the only person in my family who had ever actually listened to me—had been slowing down. The last time I’d visited, he’d taken longer to stand up from his chair, longer to make it down the hallway, but his mind had still been sharp. He’d still corrected me when I mixed up the names of two rivers on an old map, still smiled like he was proud of me for even trying.
But requesting I skip Thanksgiving didn’t track.
Olivia kept going, smoothly, like she’d rehearsed it.
“And you should probably save the airfare money. I know consulting pays well, but those flights from Denver aren’t cheap.”
There it was.
Olivia had never once in her entire thirty-three years worried about my finances. She’d borrowed $3,000 from me years ago for a “business opportunity” that turned out to be a multilevel marketing scam. She never paid me back. When I asked about it later, she told me I was being petty about money between siblings, like I was the one who didn’t understand how family worked.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“Great. Love you. Bye.”
She hung up before I could respond.
I sat there for a long moment staring at my screens, the code frozen in place like it was waiting for me to blink and return to the real enemy. Something was wrong. That conversation had the same rhythm as the phishing emails I analyzed: all the right words, polite on the surface, but the underlying intent was rotten.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page to discover the rest 🔎👇
