The thing about walking into a room full of people who want you dead is that you can feel it on your skin. Not the temperature, not the air conditioning—the hate. It crawls over you like invisible insects, making every hair on your arm stand up straight.
That’s exactly what I felt when I pushed open the heavy oak door of Theodore Banks’s law office on that Tuesday morning in September. My mother saw me first. Vanessa Parker sat in a leather chair that probably cost more than my entire year’s rent, wearing a black Chanel suit that screamed “grieving widow’s daughter-in-law,” even though she’d barely spoken to my grandfather in five years.
Her blonde hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and her face was carefully arranged into an expression of sorrow that didn’t quite reach her cold blue eyes. When those eyes landed on me, her perfectly painted red lips curved into a smile. That smile made my stomach turn.
“Madison,” she said, her voice dripping with fake sweetness. “How unexpected. I didn’t realize you’d been invited.”
My father, Gregory Parker, sat beside her.
He looked older than I remembered. Five years could do that, I supposed. His dark skin had more lines around the eyes, and his salt-and-pepper hair had gone mostly silver.
He wore an expensive navy suit and a power tie—the same uniform he’d worn every day of my childhood. He didn’t smile at me. He just stared, jaw tight, like I was a stain on his perfect leather chair.
“Miss Parker was specifically requested to attend,” Theodore Banks said from behind his massive mahogany desk. He was a tall, thin man in his 60s with kind brown eyes and a calm voice that somehow made me feel less like I was drowning. “Please, Madison, take a seat.”
The only empty chair was between my parents and my brother.
Bennett Parker sprawled in his chair like he owned the place. At 28, he’d turned into a carbon copy of our father—expensive suit, expensive watch, expensive attitude. His dark eyes flickered over me with barely concealed disgust.
“Still shopping at thrift stores, I see,” he muttered. I looked down at my simple black dress. It was from Target, actually, and it was clean and pressed and perfectly appropriate for a will reading.
But to Bennett, anything that didn’t have a designer label might as well be garbage. I didn’t respond. I just sat down in the empty chair and folded my hands in my lap.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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