The six months came and went. The summer arrived, and with it, a fresh crop of crises.
In June, she told me the Alliance had faced an internal audit, delaying the retainer disbursements. In September, she insisted that an executive director who promised her a four-event gala series had taken medical leave. In December, she looked at me over coffee at a corner shop three miles from our house—she never invited me to the Lincoln Park apartment—and told me that terminating the lease now would be professional suicide.
“If I pull out now, Sydney, everything you’ve invested will be lost,” she reasoned, her voice smooth and devoid of the tears from that first night. “Do you want eighty thousand dollars of family effort to simply evaporate? You’re an operations manager, Syd. You understand sunk costs and momentum. Hold the line. The winter gala season will break this wide open.”
So, I held the line.
I delayed my graduate school application for a second year. I took on supplemental graveyard auditing shifts for a cold-storage logistics outfit in Bedford Park on Friday and Saturday nights. When the heater in my Civic failed in the middle of a brutal Chicago January, I drove to work wearing three layers of wool socks and thermal gloves because I couldn’t afford the eight-hundred-dollar blower-motor replacement while carrying two rents.
And every Sunday dinner, Samantha would look across the roast beef, smile at Natalie, and say:
“Sydney, sweetheart, you really ought to consider a second job. It’s so disheartening to see a girl your age unable to afford a decent weekend coat.”
Chapter 3: The Web of Double Deceit
By the thirty-second month, the total sum transferred from my bank account to Parkview Property Management had crossed seventy-six thousand dollars.
I was twenty pounds lighter than I had been two years prior, living on adrenaline and cheap bulk oats. My bank balance rarely hovered above three digits before the next paycheck landed. Every time my phone vibrated with a bank notification, my stomach seized with an instinctive, nauseating panic.
The breaking point did not arrive in an explosion of anger; it arrived over a basket of warm rye bread at The Bohemian House, a traditional Czech restaurant in Berwyn that my father loved. It was Richard’s sixty-fourth birthday.
