The Cabin in Talkeetna
The night Savannah got the Westchester house, Derek looked at my inheritance and laughed like it was a joke written specifically for me. Not a polite chuckle. Not an uncomfortable laugh you make when you’re trying to smooth over an awkward moment.
But a genuine, contemptuous laugh that said everything about how he saw me, how he’d always seen me, how I’d been too desperate to notice. “A cabin in Alaska,” he said, shaking his head while adjusting his cufflinks—those expensive silver ones his mother had bought him, the ones he wore when he wanted to feel important. “Your sister gets three-quarters of a million dollars in property and you get… what?
A shack in the woods?”
We were standing in our Brooklyn apartment—the one-bedroom we’d shared for two years, the one where I paid more than my fair share of rent while he “invested in his future.” The one that suddenly felt too small to contain my humiliation. “It’s not about the money,” I said weakly, though I wasn’t sure I believed it. “It’s always about the money, Maya.” Derek picked up my engagement ring from where I’d set it on the counter—the modest diamond I’d told him I loved because I’d trained myself to want less, to be grateful for whatever scraps people gave me.
He turned it over in his fingers like he was appraising it. “You know what this tells me? That even your own family knows you’re a complete failure.”
The word hung in the air between us.
Failure. “Derek—”
“No, seriously. Think about it.
Your parents had assets to distribute, and they gave your sister the valuable property—the house in a good neighborhood, the investment that will appreciate, the thing that says ‘we believe in you.’ And they gave you a literal shack in Alaska that’s probably worth less than my car.”
He placed the ring deliberately on the counter, like he was setting down a losing poker hand. “I can’t do this anymore,” he said, his voice taking on that practiced quality that suggested he’d been rehearsing this speech. “I thought you had potential.
I thought you were going to make something of yourself. But you’re thirty years old, you do freelance work that barely pays the bills, and now your own family has confirmed what I’ve been trying to ignore: you’re never really going to go far.”
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