Chapter 1 - The Morning After
The highway stretched out before me in a blur of gray asphalt and endless possibilities.
My phone had been buzzing in the cup holder for the last three hours.
I ignored it.
I had driven through the night without stopping, crossing state lines until the rising sun painted the horizon in shades of violent orange.
By seven in the morning, I pulled into a diner parking lot outside of Chicago.
I ordered a cup of black coffee and finally picked up my phone.
There were fourteen text messages from my mother.
The first few were completely casual, entirely ignoring the fact that I had vanished in the middle of the night.
She demanded that I stop sulking and pick up oat milk on my way home.
The tone shifted around three in the morning.
She complained that the internet had suddenly been shut off.
At six in the morning, my father had chimed in with a furious text.
He demanded to know why my portion of the mortgage had not been transferred into his checking account.
I took a slow sip of my coffee and blocked both of their phone numbers.
For twelve years, I had been the silent engine keeping their chaotic, financially illiterate lives afloat.
Now, they were going to learn exactly how quickly a ship sinks when the engine is removed.
I opened my banking app to check the balance of my private savings account.
The screen loaded, and my heart completely stopped in my chest.
My balance was negative forty dollars.
I frantically refreshed the page, assuming it was a glitch in the server.
The numbers remained exactly the same.
Someone had initiated a massive, unauthorized wire transfer at two in the morning.
I clicked on the transaction history, my hands shaking so violently I almost dropped the phone into my coffee.
Fifty thousand dollars had been drained from my account and routed to a luxury real estate holding company.
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My parents had not just canceled my birthday dinner.
While I was driving away, they had stolen every single penny I had saved for my entire adult life.
