Chapter 5 - The Cracks in the Facade
By Wednesday afternoon, the first shockwaves hit the Sterling household.
The Cook County Sheriff’s Department arrived at Arthur Sterling’s corner office at Sterling & Cole Capital during their weekly executive board meeting. Two uniformed deputies served him with the Emergency Restraining Order in front of twelve senior managing partners and three institutional investors.
According to a junior analyst who texted my old college friend, Arthur went purple. He tried to brush it off as “a family nuisance,” but when the deputies informed him he had to surrender his concealed carry permit and immediately vacate his suburban residence if Maya happened to be present, the senior partner, Robert Cole, called an immediate recess.
Two hours later, Ethan Vance—Chloe’s fiancé—knocked on the door of my small, one-bedroom apartment in Lincoln Square.
I didn't open the deadbolt right away. I checked the peephole. Ethan was standing on the welcome mat alone, dressed in a wrinkled polo shirt, looking utterly gutted.
“Maya?” he called softly through the wood. “Please. I just want to talk. Five minutes. Just me.”
I unhooked the chain and pulled the door open six inches. “Ethan. If you’re here on behalf of Chloe, save your breath. The lawyers are handling everything.”
“I’m not here for Chloe,” Ethan said, his voice cracking. He looked down at his feet, then brought his gaze up to my face. When he saw the massive purple-and-black bruise spreading across my cheekbone, he visibly flinched. “Oh God, Maya. She told me you fell. She told me your dad was trying to catch you.”
I opened the door all the way. “Come in.”
Ethan walked into my modest apartment. He took in the secondhand bookshelf, the ten-year-old IKEA sofa, the small kitchen table covered in legal folders and bank statements. This was how I lived. While Chloe flaunted designer shoes and five-hundred-dollar brunch tabs on Instagram, I budgeted forty dollars a week for groceries.
Ethan pulled an embossed jewelry box from his coat pocket and placed it on my counter. He popped the lid.
Inside sat the three-carat cushion-cut diamond ring, gleaming brilliantly in the afternoon light.
“She told me her grandmother had left her a small trust fund,” Ethan whispered, sitting heavily on a wooden stool. “She said she wanted to contribute to the ring because she had specific tastes and didn't want me to shoulder the entire financial burden. I thought… I thought it was sweet. I thought she was being modern and supportive.”
I pulled a single sheet of paper from my file and slid it across the island.
It was the invoice from Cartier on Michigan Avenue.
Customer Name: *Maya Sterling (Authorized Cardholder: Chloe Sterling).*
Billing Address: *My apartment.*
Amount: *$12,700.00.*
Date of Transaction: *Three days before Ethan proposed.*
Ethan read the paper. His hands began to shake violently.
“She lied to me about everything,” he said, looking up with tears glistening in his eyes. “My parents… Maya, my parents are old-fashioned. They value integrity above everything. My dad worked forty years at a logistics plant. When your father did that to you in the ballroom, my parents were disgusted. But Chloe swore you were an addict. She told my mother you were stealing from the family to fund a pill habit.”
A bitter, humorless laugh escaped my throat. “A pill habit? Look at my bank statements, Ethan. Look at my paystubs. I work fifty-five hours a week at a logistics software firm. I don't drink. I don't do drugs. The only crime I committed was trusting my sister when she asked to borrow my phone to look up a dinner reservation.”
Ethan put his head in his hands. “I gave her eight thousand dollars of my own savings to put down on the wedding venue deposit yesterday morning. She told me the vendor needed cash immediately.”
“Check with the venue,” I told him gently. “I guarantee you she didn’t pay them. She probably paid off her personal American Express balance.”
Ethan stood up. He left the diamond ring sitting on the granite counter.
“Keep it,” he said, his voice completely hollow. “Take it to the jeweler. Pawn it. Sell it. Get your money back.”
“Ethan, legally this is evidence right now,” I replied. “Give it to Marcus Vance, my lawyer. He’ll place it in an escrow account. If you give it to me directly, Chloe’s lawyer will claim you and I conspired to steal her personal property.”
Ethan looked at me with profound sorrow. “She’s not the person I thought she was, Maya. None of them are.”
May you like
“I know,” I said softly. “It took me twenty-eight years to accept it. You figured it out in forty-eight hours. Count yourself lucky.”
***
