Chapter 2
The room was barely large enough for the two folded blankets I had already seen from the kitchen.
There was no dramatic hidden object waiting for me inside. That was what made it worse. This wasn’t a misunderstanding my family could explain away with one excuse. Clara and Toby had actually been expected to sleep in a storage space while my parents and sister treated the rest of the house as their own.
I turned back toward Clara.
“How long has this been happening?”
She looked at Natalie before she looked at me, and that tiny movement told me more than any speech could have.
Natalie cut in immediately. “Andrew, don’t let her manipulate you. We were trying to teach her responsibility.”
I glanced at my phone on the counter. It was still recording.
Then I looked toward the security cameras.
My father noticed.
For the first time that night, he stopped talking.
I didn’t explain what the cameras had captured or how much I already knew. I simply told Clara to keep Toby with her and said we were done arguing for the night.
Tomorrow would give my family exactly what they had demanded: a table, a document, and my signature.
May you like
But the document had never been written to hand them control of Clara’s home or my company.
And when my father finally read the page placed in front of him the next morning, he looked up at me and realized the signature they had been pushing me toward was about to change who had control—not the way they expected.
