Chapter 5 - The Confrontation on the 42nd Floor
When my mother walked into the conference room, she looked like a woman who had been dragged through a hurricane.
Her signature manicured hair was coming undone. Her eyes were red-rimmed, devoid of the glossy, rehearsed perfection she had worn like armor for thirty years. She carried a oversized leather handbag like a shield against her stomach.
She didn't look at Eleanor. She didn't look at Mr. Vance.
She looked at me.
"Arya," Mom breathed out, her voice trembling with a terrifying blend of rage and desperation. "Look at what you’ve done."
"I haven't done anything, Mom," I said, staying seated behind the glass table. "You stole two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars from my future. I just stopped letting you hide it."
"I did that for your sister!" Mom shrieked, slamming her hand onto the glass table. "Madison was struggling! She had a baby! She needed a home! You were doing fine!"
"I was doing fine because I worked eighteen hours a day!" I shouted back, standing up so fast my leather chair rolled against the window. "I worked while Madison went to parties! I built a business while Madison shopped with your stolen credit cards! You didn't give her help, Mom—you gave her a lifestyle she couldn't afford on my back!"
"You owe this family!" Mom cried out, tears spilling down her foundation. "I raised you! I fed you! I gave you a roof over your head!"
"You were obligated to feed me, Linda!" Eleanor’s voice boomed across the room, shutting my mother down instantly. "That is called parenting, not a commercial loan!"
Mom turned to Eleanor, her face twisting into pure hatred. "You’ve always loved her more! You’ve always looked down on me because I didn't come from your stupid Newport family!"
"I looked down on you, Linda," Eleanor said with quiet, lethal precision, "because you are a thief with a vanity complex. You sacrificed one child to build a idol out of the other. And now the idol is falling."
Mom turned back to me, her breathing ragged. She reached into her leather bag and pulled out a thick envelope, slapping it onto the table in front of me.
"What is this?" I asked.
"It’s a deed transfer," Mom whispered, her eyes manic. "Sign the car back to Madison. Tell Vance to drop the audit on the townhouse. If you do that... I’ll make sure your father doesn't disown you."
I looked at the white paper. Then I looked at my mother.
She still thought she had leverage. She still believed that the threat of being cast out of her fake, toxic family was a weapon that could bring me to my knees.
I took the deed transfer paper in both hands.
And I tore it in half.
Then I tore it in quarters.
I dropped the white scraps onto the glass table like falling snow.
"Dad isn't disowning me, Mom," I said softly. "You’ve disowned yourself."
Mom stared at the torn paper on the table, her mouth working silently like a fish out of water.
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"Get out of my lawyers' office, Linda," Eleanor commanded quietly. "Before I have security escort you to the street."
My mother backed away from the table, her eyes filled with a dark, hollow horror as she realized that the world she had controlled for thirty years had completely ceased to exist.
