Chapter 4 - The Aftershocks
The first week of November passed with the terrifying, beautiful silence of a cleared battlefield.
I didn't answer my door for strangers. I ignored unknown numbers flashing on my phone, sending every single one straight to voicemail without listening to a second of audio. My assistant at work, a sharp twenty-four-year-old named Chloe, had strict instructions: If anyone with the last name Whitman calls the office, or shows up in the lobby, security escort them out immediately.
At work, I threw myself into my projects with a ferocious, laser-focused intensity. My managing director noticed the spike in my output and praised me during our Tuesday review meeting, hinting broadly at a partnership track opening up the following year.
"You're operating on a different level lately, Rachel," he said, leaning back in his leather chair. "Whatever personal clarity you've found, keep channeling it."
"I will," I said, smiling professionally.
The personal clarity came with a hefty side of neighborhood intelligence, courtesy of Aunt Sylvia.
Aunt Sylvia was my mother’s older sister, a sharp-tongued seventy-two-year-old who lived three towns over and had spent forty years playing the role of the family’s unofficial intelligence agency. Sylvia had never liked my mother’s transparent favoritism toward Eric and Lauren, and she had always had a soft spot for me, recognizing early on that I was the pack mule carrying the entire family’s financial wagon.
On Friday afternoon, my desk phone chimed. I glanced at the caller ID: Sylvia Miller.
I pressed speakerphone. "Hey, Aunt Sylvia."
"Rachel, honey," Sylvia’s voice crackled through the speaker, dripping with a mixture of righteous indignation and suppressed glee. "Tell me it’s not true. Tell me you didn't just drop a nuclear bomb on Elmwood Avenue."
I couldn't help a small smile from pulling at the corner of my lips. "It’s true, Sylvia. Every word of it."
A sharp whistle blew through the phone line. "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Your mother has been camped out on my landline for three days sobbing into chamomile tea. She says you've gone feral. She told me you cut them off out of nowhere because Mason dropped a pea on your plate."
"A piece of pork fat and mashed potatoes, actually. And he didn't drop it—he spat it directly into my face while Derek smiled and everyone laughed," I corrected calmly.
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. When Sylvia spoke again, her voice had lost its teasing edge, replaced by a cold, hardened hardness.
"They laughed?"
"Laughed and called me the family queen," I said. "And Eric chimed in about my corporate salary. So I reminded them who had been paying their mortgage for the last three years."
Sylvia let out a low, appreciative whistle. "Oh, Lord. The earthquake must have registered on the Richter scale. Arthur had to call an emergency family summit on Monday night. Do you know what happened?"
"I blocked them all, Sylvia. I don't know anything."
"Well, let me fill you in, because the gossip in this county travels faster than wildfire," Sylvia said, lowering her voice conspiratorially. "Arthur finally had to confess—not just to Eric and Lauren, but to everyone—that the construction business didn't bounce back three years ago like he claimed. He had to show them the bank notices. The house is ninety days behind on payments already. The bank is breathing down their necks."
I felt a cold prickle of satisfaction, mingled with a lingering, ghostly pang of residual guilt. I crushed the guilt immediately.
"What did Eric and Lauren do?" I asked.
"Do?" Sylvia snorted. "Eric turned white as a ghost and started stammering about how his crypto portfolio was tied up and he couldn't even make his own car payment, let alone chip in twelve hundred dollars a month. And Lauren? Oh, honey. Lauren looked at Derek expecting him to step up like a real man, and Derek—Mr. Big Entrepreneur—crossed his arms and said, 'Look, I told you months ago we shouldn't be buying into this suburban trap. We have our own family to look after.'"
I blinked. "Derek said that?"
"Word for word," Sylvia cackled. "The man is a coward of legendary proportions. He’s already talking about moving into a rental apartment across town to separate his finances from Lauren’s family mess. Lauren has been crying so hard her eyelashes fell off."
"What about Mom and Dad?"
"Well, they're panicked," Sylvia said. "Your mother called me yesterday afternoon begging me to intercede. She actually had the nerve to say, 'Sylvia, talk some sense into her. She has all that money just sitting in her corporate account while her aging parents are facing homelessness.' I told your mother straight to her face: 'Helen, you reap what you sow. You raised a pack of wolves and expected your oldest daughter to be the sheep. Now the sheep has grown teeth.' I hung up on her."
I laughed out loud—a rich, genuine sound that I hadn't made in years.
"Thanks, Sylvia," I said softly.
"Don't thank me, honey. Thank yourself for finally growing a spine," Sylvia replied briskly. "Now, go take a vacation. You've earned every penny of that twenty-four hundred dollars you're saving every month. Go buy yourself something ridiculous."
After we hung up, I sat back in my executive chair and stared out the glass wall of my office at the glittering Columbus skyline.
I opened my banking app. I looked at the available balance in my checking account, then at the high-yield savings account where the first month’s $2,400 had been automatically deposited.
Two thousand four hundred dollars. Every single month. For thirty-six months.
May you like
That was eighty-six thousand four hundred dollars of my hard-earned money—money I had earned working eighty-hour weeks while they vacationed, complained, and mocked me behind my back.
I closed the app, locked my phone, and opened a new browser tab. I typed in three words that I hadn't allowed myself to even dream about in five years: Flights to Rome.
