The Sunday dinner ritual had become a performance I’d grown to dread, though I showed up every week like a dutiful daughter because some habits are harder to break than others. The heavy scent of roasted beef and my mother’s nervous Chanel No. 5 filled the formal dining room of the house where I’d grown up, a Victorian-style home on Maple Street that had been in our family for three generations.
My brother Ethan sat at my father’s right hand, gesturing grandly as he pitched his latest “guaranteed success” startup idea—something about AI-driven cryptocurrency platforms, a word salad of buzzwords he’d clearly learned from a podcast during his morning commute. I sat in my usual seat across from him, silent, observing. My name is Anna Vance.
I’m thirty-two years old, and I teach high school history at Lincoln High, where I’ve worked for the past eight years. I know my brother better than anyone in this room wants to admit. I know his “can’t-fail” ideas have a perfect failure rate, each one costing my parents more than the last—the organic juice bar that folded in six months, the app development company that never developed a single app, the real estate flipping venture that left him holding properties he couldn’t sell in a down market.
My father, Robert Vance, a man whose sense of patriarchal authority was his only real currency since retiring from a middle-management position five years ago, was eating up every word. He saw Ethan as the “future of the family legacy,” the son who would finally elevate the Vance name to the heights Robert had always imagined for himself but never achieved. He saw me as a mild, unambitious disappointment—a woman with a “stable salary” and nothing more, someone who’d chosen the safe, unremarkable path of public service instead of chasing the American dream of entrepreneurial wealth.
“The only thing holding me back, Dad,” Ethan said, pausing for dramatic effect as he set down his wine glass, “is the initial seed capital. The venture capitalists I’ve been talking to want to see family commitment first. They want to know the Vance family believes in this vision.”
My father nodded grimly, his jaw set in that way that meant he was about to make a pronouncement.
He turned his heavy gaze toward me, and I felt my stomach tighten with familiar dread. “Anna,” he said, his voice carrying the weight of assumed authority. “Your mother tells me you’ve managed to build up a substantial savings account over the years.”
I set down my fork carefully, buying myself a moment.
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