He looked at me closely then, his blue eyes narrowing behind his reading glasses. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason, Dad,” I lied, my voice shaking so hard I had to bite the inside of my cheek to steady it. “Just… someone mentioned seeing her near Fullerton Parkway last week. Thought maybe she had a client down there.”
“Probably window shopping,” Dad muttered, picking up his screwdriver. “Your mother has an appetite for things she can’t afford. Always has. Just like Natalie. Thank God you got my wiring, Syd. You don’t chase smoke.”
I walked out of that house feeling like the floorboards were made of rotting gauze.
That evening, I did something I had never done in my entire life: I became an auditor of Samantha Turner’s digital vanity.
I sat in my dark apartment, the blue glow of my dual monitors reflecting against the bare walls. I opened my mother’s private Instagram account—an account she had blocked me from seeing two years prior, claiming it was “purely for industry networking,” but which Eric accessed through a burner profile.
The screen filled with high-resolution photographs.
There was Samantha, holding a glass of pale pinot noir on a wrought-iron balcony overlooking the lush treetops of Lincoln Park.
There was Samantha, seated on a white bouclé curved sofa that I had never seen before, surrounded by brass floor lamps and oversized art books, beneath the caption: “Late evening strategic planning in my personal sanctuary. Creativity requires space to breathe. #ExecutiveLife #ChicagoDesign #CuratedLiving.”
There were photographs of intimate dinner parties for four—women in cashmere shawls, men in tailored blazers—dining around a marble-topped tulip table in Unit 4B.
The Lincoln Park apartment was not an office. It had never been an office.
It was her secret salon. It was the stage where she pretended to be a wealthy, unburdened dowager of the arts. She had leased a luxury pied-à-terre three miles from our father’s modest home, furnished it with credit, and used my eighty-one thousand six hundred dollars of sweat, missed sleep, rusted brake pads, and deferred dreams to pay the stage crew.
And to ensure that Dad never investigated where she spent her afternoons, and to ensure that Natalie never questioned her financial solvency, she had woven a web of calculated, symmetrical slander: she told Dad I was a financial failure; she told Natalie she was supporting me; and she told me she was building a legacy for our family.
