That night, the massive red bow on the hood of the new BMW looked less like a gift and more like a beautifully tied curse. My sister received a German engineering marvel, while I got an envelope so thin it was embarrassing. Inside were exactly two single dollar bills—a gentle slap to my dignity. I did not scream. I simply walked out into the snow. And at two in the morning, I blocked every single one of them.
My name is Chloe Allen, and for the last fourteen years, I have existed as a piece of office furniture in the lives of my own family. I was thirty-four years old, standing in the manicured driveway of my father’s sprawling estate in Brier Glenn, watching snow fall on a scene that looked like it had been staged for a holiday luxury car commercial. The air was biting, the kind of cold that slips through wool coats and settles into your bones, but the temperature was nothing compared to the absolute zero emanating from the people standing around me.
Brier Glenn is the sort of town where neighbors judge you by the landscaping crew you hire and the vintage of the wine you serve at casual Tuesday dinners. It is a place of performative happiness, and tonight, the Caldwell family was putting on the performance of a lifetime.
I stood slightly off to the side. Naturally, that was my spot. I was the reliable one, the practical one, the one who knew the alarm codes, the one who scheduled the gutter cleaning, the one who reminded my father, Gordon, to take his cholesterol medication, and the one who balanced the household ledgers because my stepmother, Tessa, treated bank accounts like infinite magic wells. I was the logistics manager of their chaotic, glossy lives. I was the person you called when the toilet overflowed, not the person you toasted with champagne. And tonight, the champagne was flowing because my half-sister, Belle, had just turned twenty-four.
The double oak doors of the garage swung open with a theatrical groan. My father stepped out, his face flushed with brandy and pride, gesturing grandly to the driveway where the object of everyone’s affection sat idling. It was a brand new BMW X5, sleek and black, sitting there like a crouching panther. But the pièce de résistance was the red bow. It was massive, velvety, and tied with a perfection that bordered on aggressive. It sat on the hood of that car like a crown.
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