Chapter 3 - The Price of Luxury
The silence fractured into absolute chaos.
“Brooke Ashley Miller,” Mom whispered. Her voice wasn’t loud, but it cut through the room like a straight razor. “Your middle name. Your license number.”
“Mom, listen to me!” Brooke lunged toward the table, her manicured nails clawing at the paperwork, but Uncle Greg moved unexpectedly fast. He reached out an arm, pinning the document flat to the table before Brooke could snatch it.
“Don’t touch it, Brooke,” Greg said, his easygoing uncle persona vanishing into the cold reality of a retired accountant. “Let Eleanor read it.”
“It’s not what it looks like!” Brooke’s voice went shrill. “I was trying to help! I had debts—credit card debts from when my boutique failed! I was going to buy the stones back before anyone noticed! I was going to replace them!”
“With what?” I stepped closer to her, my voice dropping into that chilling calm that only comes when you have swallowed years of abuse and finally reached the end of the line. “With the nine thousand dollars you tried to shake out of me tonight?”
The guests stared in disgust. Aunt Clara took a sharp breath through her teeth. “Lord have mercy. You stole your own mother’s ring, gutted the stones for cash, and then tried to make Emma pay you for it?”
“She can afford it!” Brooke screamed, completely dropping the mask of the refined, beloved stepsister. Her eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with smudged mascara. “She lives like a monk! She works seventy hours a week in that dusty warehouse sewing cushions! She doesn’t have student loans, she doesn’t have car payments! Meanwhile, I was drowning! Dad left me *nothing* when he died, and Mom gave everything to Emma’s college fund!”
“Your father spent his entire pension gambling in Atlantic City before he married my mother, Brooke!” I snapped back. “My father died when I was twelve and left a modest life insurance policy that barely covered my state tuition! Don’t you dare rewrite history in this room!”
Mom was trembling violently now. She reached out and touched the leather of the expensive handbag Brooke had presented to her just half an hour earlier.
“This bag,” Mom whispered, her fingers trailing over the gold clasp. “You told me you saved up for six months to buy this for my sixtieth birthday. You told me it came from the boutique in Chicago.”
Brooke froze. She didn’t answer.
“Arthur Vance called the detective division,” I told Mom. “Brooke walked out of the pawn broker on High Street with seventy-five hundred dollars on Tuesday. This designer bag retails for twenty-four hundred. She didn't buy you a gift, Mom. She bought this bag with Dad’s sapphire, and she planned to pocket the remaining five thousand to pay off her delinquent car lease.”
Mom picked up the handbag. For a second, I thought she was going to hug it to her chest, as she so often did when Brooke gave her scraps of affection. Eleanor had spent the last eight years bending over backward to make Brooke feel ‘included’ after her father died, terrified of being labeled the wicked stepmother. She had sacrificed her dignity, her boundaries, and her relationship with her biological daughter just to keep Brooke smiling.
Instead, Mom did something I had never seen her do in my entire life.
She stood up, took the two-thousand-dollar designer bag by its pristine leather strap, and threw it into the roaring gas fireplace across the room.
The synthetic lining ignited with an aggressive *whoosh*. A plume of toxic, chemical smoke billowed toward the mantle before the flue caught it.
“Mom!” Brooke shrieked, darting toward the hearth.
“Get out of my house,” Mom said.
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It wasn't a shout. It was an eviction.
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