Chapter 2
I'd have let it go, honestly, if it had only been toys. I'd watched my mother redirect birthday gifts and holiday presents toward Camille for years — not stealing exactly, more a quiet, persistent reallocation she'd always framed as generosity toward "the daughter who actually needs it," a phrase she used often enough that I'd stopped hearing the insult buried inside it.
What stopped me from letting it go this time was the gift box that had fallen open during the commotion, tissue paper spilling out onto the table, and underneath it, an envelope with Aubrielle's full name written on the front in handwriting I recognized as my mother's own.
I picked it up before I'd fully decided to. Inside was a document I hadn't seen before — a trust account, established in Aubrielle's name three years earlier, funded with an amount that made my hands go still around the paper. Multi-million dollars. My mother, whatever else was true about her, had genuinely set this up for my daughter, apparently without ever mentioning it to me, which was its own kind of strange but not, in that moment, the part that mattered most.
Behind the trust documentation was a second page. A withdrawal request, dated less than two weeks earlier, against that same account. Amount: two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Requested recipient, printed clearly enough that there was no possibility of misreading it: Marietta.
May you like
I looked up at my mother slowly, the birthday party continuing obliviously around us, a few kids still running through the yard, a couple of guests starting to notice something in the stillness between us.
"So this party wasn't about my daughter's presents," I said.
