Chapter 5 - The Invitation
A week passed in an eerie, unbroken quiet.
No texts from Harper. No pleading voicemails from my mother. Just the sound of the wind through the pines and the steady hum of my refrigerator. I spent my mornings on the porch with my coffee and my evenings going through every financial document I could pull from the county archives regarding Sterling Auto Consulting.
The picture was worse than I thought. Chase hadn't just taken out commercial loans; he had used forged guarantor signatures on at least two of them, using my mother’s name as a secondary co-signer without her knowledge—or perhaps with it, though at this point it was hard to tell where my mother’s delusions ended and Chase’s fraud began.
Then, on a Tuesday afternoon, a heavy cream-colored envelope arrived in the mail.
Inside was an embossed invitation: You are cordially invited to celebrate the upcoming arrival of baby Grayson at a baby shower hosted by Margaret and Robert Sterling at the Ashton Gardens Country Club.
At the bottom, written in my mother’s unmistakable, looping script, was a post-it note stuck to the card: Please come. Harper really needs her sister right now. Let’s put all this silliness behind us.
An hour later, my father called. His voice was barely a whisper, muffled against the receiver as if he were calling from inside a closet.
"You should probably come," he said.
"Why?" I asked, my fingers tapping against the kitchen counter.
A long, painful pause stretched down the line. I could hear my mother’s television playing softly in the background at their house—some daytime talk show with a live studio audience.
"Your mother’s been telling people you worked things out," my father said quietly.
I stopped tapping. "What does that mean?"
"She told the ladies at her bridge club yesterday that you signed the house over to Harper as a baby gift," he said, the shame dripping from every syllable. "She said you were going to make a public announcement at the shower on Saturday so everyone could see how generous you were being."
May you like
For a long moment, I didn't say anything. The sheer, breathtaking audacity of it took my breath away. They weren't just trying to steal my house; they were trying to rewrite the narrative so thoroughly that I would look like the benevolent donor who gave it away willingly, trapped by my own family’s PR campaign.
"All right," I said softly. "I'll be there."
