The Stolen Penthouse
My key slid into the lock, a familiar ritual after a fifteen-hour flight from Singapore, but it didn’t turn. It hit a wall of resistance, the metal grinding against metal in a way that sent alarm bells through my exhausted mind. It was dead.
I jiggled it, thinking perhaps the mechanism was jammed by the humidity that had settled over Manhattan during the unseasonably warm October, but deep down, the cold steel told me a different truth—a truth I didn’t want to acknowledge even as evidence mounted.
Through the glass panels of my front door, I saw movement. A silhouette.
A stranger was sitting on my custom leather sofa—the Italian one I’d saved for eighteen months to afford—his feet up on the coffee table, drinking what appeared to be my Glenfiddich 30-year-old scotch, the bottle I’d been saving for a special occasion that never seemed to come. Panic didn’t set in immediately.
Instead, rage did—hot, white, and clarifying.
I pounded on the door with the flat of my palm, the glass rattling violently in its frame, the sound echoing through the hallway like a drum announcing war. The door swung open after a moment, but it wasn’t the stranger who answered. It was my brother, Brandon.
He was wearing my silk robe—the midnight blue one I had bought in Kyoto two years ago during a rare vacation, the fabric hand-embroidered with cherry blossoms—and he didn’t look surprised to see me standing there with my suitcase and laptop bag.
He didn’t look guilty or ashamed or even slightly uncomfortable. He looked bored.
He looked like a man interrupted during a commercial break, annoyed that his entertainment had been paused by something inconvenient. “You’re trespassing,” he sneered, his body blocking the entrance, one arm braced against the doorframe like a bouncer outside a nightclub.
“I sold this place last week.”
I froze.
The world seemed to tilt on its axis, the hallway spinning slightly as my jet-lagged brain struggled to process the words. My own brother, standing in the foyer of the sanctuary I had built with years of brutal work and sacrifice, telling me with absolute casual cruelty that he had sold my home while I was overseas auditing a corrupt pharmaceutical chain in Southeast Asia. “What did you say?” My voice was a whisper, but it carried the weight of a scream, the kind of quiet that precedes an explosion.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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