Chapter 6 - The Shattered Sister
Lauren didn't look like an heiress anymore.
She had arrived without makeup, her face pale and splotchy from crying, dark purple half-moons carved under her eyes. She was wearing an oversized gray fleece pullover that belonged to Julian, leggings that bagged at the knees, and flat slip-on shoes. Her pregnant belly stretched the fleece tight, making her look fragile and impossibly young.
When she saw me standing in the doorway of Mark’s conference room, she stopped. Her lower lip quivered.
"Did you do it?" she whispered, her voice raw. "Did you call the police?"
"Come in here, Lauren," I said gently, stepping aside. "Sit down."
"I don't want to sit down in a lawyer's office!" she cried, though she stepped into the room anyway, clutching a designer handbag against her chest like a shield. "Mom said you're trying to put Julian in prison! She said you hired Derek’s old lawyer to destroy us!"
"Lauren, take a breath," I told her, closing the door behind us. Mark Vance stood up politely, motioning toward the conference table.
"Mrs. Vance," Mark said in his calm, measured tone. "I think you need to look at these documents before you say another word."
"I don't care about documents!" Lauren’s voice rose into a shrill, panic-stricken wail. "My baby is coming in eight weeks! We have a nursery painted in French gray! We have a crib that took four months to ship from Italy! And Julian says if Rae doesn't sign the affidavit by noon, the sheriff is going to show up at our house with an eviction notice! Is that what you want, Rae? Do you want your niece sleeping on the street just so you can prove you were right about men?"
"Lauren," I said, my voice hardening. "Look at the table."
She stopped. Her chest heaved.
"Look at the papers," I repeated. "Look at the signatures."
Reluctantly, as if the paper might burn her skin, Lauren leaned over the conference table. She looked down at the Apex Capital loan application.
She saw my name typed under the guarantor box. Then she saw the signature line. It was an electronic signature, generated from an IP address, but attached to it was a forged driver's license scan—an old copy of my license from five years ago, back when Derek and I had shared a safety deposit box with our parents.
"Julian did this," I said quietly. "Not me. Not the banks. Julian."
"He... he said it was a corporate restructuring," she stammered, her fingers hovering over the paper. "He said you were helping us."
"Did you honestly think I had four hundred thousand dollars to guarantee a commercial loan, Lauren?" I asked, stepping closer to her. "I work forty hours a week managing marketing campaigns for software startups. I drive a Honda with a dented bumper. Where on earth did you think that money was coming from?"
"I thought... I thought you had Derek's life insurance payout!" she blurted out.
I stopped dead. "Derek isn't dead."
Lauren blinked, her cheeks flushing crimson. "Mom told me... Mom said Derek gave you a secret settlement when you signed the divorce decree. She told me you were hoarding cash in a trust fund while pretending to be broke just to make the family feel guilty."
A cold, sickening fury washed over me.
Evelyn. It was always Evelyn.
My mother had invented an entire fiction to explain away why I refused to attend her social luncheons, why I lived in a modest townhouse, why I didn't drive a new car. She couldn't accept the reality that Derek had left us penniless, because admitting that meant admitting she had pushed me into marrying a fraud. So she told Lauren that I was secretly wealthy, selfish, and bitter.
"There is no settlement, Lauren," I said, every word dropping like lead. "Derek left us seventy thousand dollars in debt. I worked fifty hours a week for two years to clear my name. And while I was doing that, your husband was stealing my social security number to buy you that diamond ring."
Lauren’s eyes drifted from the loan application to Mark Vance's handwritten ledger. She saw the numbers. She saw the entries for *Vail Ski Resort*, *Land Rover Financial*, *Apex Capital Mezzanine Interest*, and *Evelyn Bennett Pension Transfer*.
"What is this?" she whispered, her finger touching the line with our parents' names. "Why are Mom and Dad on here?"
"Julian took their retirement, Lauren," I said softly. "Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. He told them it was an investment. But it’s gone. It was gone three months ago."
Lauren’s knees buckled.
She didn't fall to the floor because Mark Vance moved with surprising speed, catching her by the elbow and easing her into a heavy leather conference chair.
She sat there, staring at the mahogany grain of the table, her hands clutching her belly. The illusion—the perfect, pristine, country club illusion that our mother had spent thirty years building around her golden younger daughter—cracked from top to bottom.
"He told me we were rich," Lauren whispered, a tear tracing a path through the dust on her cheek. "He told me he was going to buy the whole hillside on Ridge Road. He told me I would never have to work again."
"Lauren," I said, crouching down beside her chair, taking her cold, manicured hand in mine. "Where is Julian right now?"
She looked at me, her eyes hollow, wide with a terrifying realization.
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"He went to the airport," she choked out. "He told me he had an emergency meeting with an equity partner in Miami. He took two suitcases from the garage."
***
