I stood up to thank my grandma for a cute $500, and she stared blankly. Then she stated, calm as ice, that she had wired me $1 million. My mom laughed too fast. My brother choked. Grandma whispered, asking who stole it from me at her table. The scariest part was not the missing money; it was that someone had planned the perfect lie, and Christmas dinner was their stage.
My name is Harper Watson, and if there is one thing my decade at Summit Ridge Risk and Compliance in Boise has taught me, it is that the truth usually hides in the silence between two heartbeats. I am thirty-four years old, and I spend my days dissecting financial fraud, hunting for the digital fingerprints of greed. I trace wire transfers through shell companies and analyze the behavioral patterns of embezzlers who think they are smarter than the system. But nothing in my professional career, not a single case of corporate malfeasance or identity theft, could have prepared me for the stillness that descended upon my grandmother’s dining room table in Wilmington, North Carolina, on Christmas Eve.
The air inside the house was thick with the scent of roasted turkey, sage stuffing, and the cloying sweetness of my mother’s signature yam casserole. It was a perfect, suffocating tableau of the American holiday. The chandelier above us cast a warm golden glow on the good china—the set my grandmother, Dorothy Klein, only brought out when she wanted to prove that this family was still whole. We were all there, playing our assigned roles.
There was my mother, Janine, wearing a red velvet dress that was perhaps a bit too bright for the occasion, her laughter ringing out a fraction of a second too early at every joke. Beside her sat my stepfather, Harold, a man who had mastered the art of blending into the wallpaper, chewing his food with a rhythmic, bovine indifference. Across from me sat my brother Caleb and his fiancé, Nolan Sutter. They were the golden couple, radiating a curated image of success and domestic bliss, though I had noticed Caleb refilling his wine glass three times within the first hour.
And then there was Grandma Dorothy at eighty-one. She sat at the head of the table, a position she had held since my grandfather passed. She looked frail this year. Her hands, usually so steady when she knitted or gardened, had a slight tremor as she manipulated her silverware, but her eyes were the same: clear, sharp, and unmistakably intelligent. She had always been the anchor, the one person in this chaotic orbit who made sense to me. I had flown in from Idaho that morning, exhausted but determined to play the part of the dutiful granddaughter.
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