Chapter 1 - The Weight of Two Years and Two Tiers
The kitchen of Victoria’s high-rise apartment smelled faintly of expensive eucalyptus and expensive desperation. It was a sterile, curated scent, entirely divorced from the chaotic, flour-dusted kitchen where I had spent the last forty-eight hours of my life. My back ached, a deep, grinding throb between my shoulder blades that usually accompanied hours of standing over a tilted cake turntable. My fingers were still stained faintly with mauve and sage food coloring, stubborn reminders of the hand-crafted fondant roses I had spent four hours individually shaping, petal by delicate petal, to match the color scheme of a birthday party I was apparently only invited to attend as manual labor.
In my arms, the custom cardboard bakery box felt heavier than its actual weight. It held a two-tier vanilla bean cake with raspberry coulis filling—a flavor Victoria had casually mentioned loving three years ago during a drunken late-night phone call when we were still pretending to be normal sisters.
I had set the box down on the stark white quartz countertop, smoothing down the flaps with a care that now felt nauseatingly pathetic. Every minute detail of that cake represented a sacrifice. I had skipped grocery shopping for myself, living on scrambled eggs and leftover oats so I could afford the imported French butter. I had turned down an extra shift at the graphic design firm where I freelanced, losing two hundred dollars of income that I desperately needed for my own mounting car insurance payments. All of it justified by the quiet, stubborn mantra I told myself every time my phone lit up with her name at 11:00 PM: She’s my little sister. We only have each other.
Then Chloe laughed from the living room.
It wasn't a warm, bubbly laugh. It was that sharp, metallic cackle that belonged exclusively to girls who grew up with trust funds and summer shares in the Hamptons—girls who viewed empathy as a social faux pas and kindness as a sign of weakness.
“Tell them what you said about the Christmas thing,” Chloe’s voice trilled over the muffled thump of a bass-heavy playlist.
“Chloe, shut up.”
Victoria’s voice drifted through the archway. It was light, melodic, and entirely devoid of the defensiveness one might expect when a friend brings up something genuinely cruel. She sounded amused. Entertained, even. Like an audience member nudging her seatmate during a particularly predictable comedy sketch.
“No, seriously,” Chloe pressed, her footsteps padding across the hardwood floors. “You said she bought you that Tiffany necklace like it meant something, and then she cried when you gave her a fifty-dollar gift card.”
A chorus of giggles erupted from the living room. Becca, Janet, Chloe, and Victoria—the four horsewomen of every superficial nightmare I had ever endured since high school.
I stood frozen beside the bakery box. The silence that suddenly stretched inside my own chest felt louder than their laughter.
The Tiffany necklace. I remembered the exact day I bought it. It was our first Christmas after Mom and Dad died in that horrific black-ice pileup on Interstate 84. I had been working two jobs—receptionist by day, night-shift data entry clerk by evening—while trying to help Victoria navigate her freshman year of college four hundred miles away. I had walked past the gleaming silver windows of the jewelry store on Fifth Avenue, shivering in my thin wool coat because I had given my better jacket to Victoria when she complained about the Ithaca cold. I saw the small, delicate double-heart pendant and thought, She’s broken. I’m broken. This will make her feel anchored. This will tell her she is still loved.
I had skipped meals for a month to pay for it. When I handed her the little blue box on Christmas morning, she had thrown her arms around my neck, sobbing into my shoulder, whispering, “You’re the only family I have left, Maya. I would be completely lost without you.”
And now, according to Chloe’s casual broadcast, that moment had been reduced to a punchline. A pathetic anecdote told over bottomless mimosas to women who wouldn't cross the street to save Victoria from a burning building.
“I’m basically her free therapist,” Victoria’s voice floated through the open space again, dripping with an icy, clinical detachment that made my stomach churn. “Real therapy costs two hundred dollars an hour. Maya is cheaper, and she brings snacks.”
That was the exact moment my feet stopped feeling like lead and started moving.
I didn't storm in. I didn't yell. I simply walked through the archway, my footsteps silent against the plush area rug.
The living room was bathed in the warm, flattering glow of designer floor lamps and smart bulbs set to 'Sunset Chill.' Victoria was lounging on the velvet sectional, a glass of expensive Pinot Noir clutched in one manicured hand. Chloe, Becca, and Janet were clustered around the coffee table like vultures sizing up a dying rabbit.
“You asked me to come early to help set up,” I said. My voice wasn't shaking. It was terrifyingly, unnaturally steady.
Every head snapped toward me.
For a fraction of a second—just a heartbeat—Victoria’s face drained of color. Her eyes widened, the glass wobbling slightly in her grip, spilling a dark crimson drop onto her white linen trousers. Panic flickered across her features, raw and instinctive.
Then, just as quickly, the mask slammed back down. Her expression hardened into an impenetrable wall of haughty annoyance.
“I asked you to drop off the cake, Maya,” she said, her tone dripping with condescension as she slowly crossed her legs. “Don’t make this weird.”
The casual cruelty of it hit me like a physical blow. Don't make this weird. As if my presence—my very existence in the room I had helped furnish with the money from my first freelance bonus—was an inconvenient glitch in her carefully curated social simulation.
I looked down at her, really looked at her. The highlighted blonde waves, the designer sweater that cost more than my monthly grocery budget, the smug, defensive tilt of her chin.
“You call me almost every night,” I said, the words tasting like ash in my mouth. “For hours. We talk about everything.”
“Because I’m bored,” Victoria shrugged, taking a slow, deliberate sip of her wine. Her eyes didn't meet mine with guilt; they met mine with the supreme boredom of an adult dealing with a persistent toddler. “You’re convenient.”
Convenient.
The word echoed in the quiet space between us.
Six years.
For six solid years, since the bleak, freezing morning the police officers stood on my college apartment doorstep with tear-stained notepads, I had structured my entire existence around Victoria. When she called at two in the morning because a boy broke her heart, I answered. When she flunked her organic chemistry midterm and threatened to drop out of college, I drove four hours through a torrential downpour to sit at her dorm desk and flash-card her until sunrise. When she wanted to move into this luxury high-rise apartment complex downtown because her sorority sisters lived here, I didn't just cosign the lease—I quietly paid half her rent every single month, draining my savings account down to double digits while telling her it was a 'special tenant promotion' negotiated by my landlord friend.
Every crisis she ever had somehow morphed into my emergency. Every emotional burden she dropped became my cross to bear until she felt light enough to skip away.
And the entire time, behind my back, I was just the convenient help.
Before I could process the suffocating wave of nausea rising in my throat, Chloe reached beneath the low marble coffee table. Her fingers hooked around the edge of a thick, heavy book bound in forest-green linen with gold-embossed lettering on the spine.
My scrapbook.
The scrapbook I had spent three months assembling for her twenty-third birthday just a few months ago.
I had hunted down old photo albums from our attic before the estate sale. I had scanned faded polaroids of Mom smiling in the garden, Dad holding Victoria on his shoulders at the lake, the gap-toothed grins of our childhood summers before cancer, debt, and sudden death tore our world apart. I had written handwritten notes beside every single photo—long, deeply personal reflections on what those moments meant, recounting shared inside jokes, childhood nicknames, and promises that no matter how old we got, our little family unit of two would remain unbreakable.
Chloe opened the heavy cover, her lips curling into a cruel, mocking smile.
“Oh, look at this,” Chloe cooed, flipping past pages of carefully taped memorabilia, movie ticket stubs from our childhood matinees, and handwritten birthday cards. She stopped at a page near the middle and pointed a sharp French-manicured fingernail directly at my handwriting.
“My amazing sister inspires me every day," Chloe read aloud, mimicking a sickeningly sweet, high-pitched voice.
The living room erupted into laughter.
Becca snorted into her cocktail glass. Janet covered her mouth, giggling hysterically.
I stared at the book in Chloe’s hands as if it were a foreign object. My chest felt hollowed out, scooped clean by a rusty spoon.
“You kept it under the coffee table?” I whispered, my voice cracking slightly despite my best efforts to keep it locked down.
Victoria met my eyes then. There was no remorse in them. No flash of shame. Just cold, clinical calculation.
“I felt bad for you,” she said smoothly, leaning her head back against the velvet cushions.
The words felt surreal. “For me?”
“You don’t really have friends the way I do,” Victoria said, gesturing vaguely with her wine glass toward the cluster of designer-clad women surrounding her. “You spend all your time working alone in that dreary apartment, or obsessing over my life because you don’t have one of your own. So... I let you think we were close. I played along because I knew it made you happy.”
The laughter in the room died down, replaced by a heavy, suffocating silence. Even Chloe seemed momentarily taken aback by the sheer brutality of the statement, though her smirk quickly returned.
Victoria wasn't done. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, staring at me with eyes that felt like chipped blue glass.
“These are my real sisters,” she said, sweeping her hand toward Chloe, Becca, and Janet. “We share a lifestyle. We share a mindset. We share actual bonds.”
May you like
She pointed a finger directly at my chest.
“You? You’re just someone I happened to share DNA with because our parents had unprotected sex twenty-something years ago. Biology doesn't make us family, Maya. Choice does. And I wouldn't choose you.”
