“Two years in prison won’t kill you, Alice.”
My father said it the way some men order a second cup of coffee—mildly irritated, mildly bored. He sat behind the huge mahogany desk in his study, the one he liked to call “command central,” with the confidence of someone who’d never heard the word “consequences” used in a sentence about him. The yellow desk lamp cast warm light over the thick folder he slid toward me, as casually as if he were passing the salt at dinner.
“Minimum security,” he added, as though that made this more thoughtful.
“You’re used to struggling. Nobody looks at you. You’ll be fine.”
The word you had never sounded so sharp.
I looked at the folder, not touching it yet.
It was fat. Too fat. The kind of folder that meant years of cheating condensed into paper: bank statements, forged signatures, cooked books, fake invoices.
Tax fraud. Embezzlement. Crimes with long names and longer sentences.
On the leather sofa to my right, my sister Beatrice made a sound like a wounded animal.
I might have believed it if I didn’t know her. She carefully pressed a white handkerchief to her lower lashes, dabbing away tears before they had a chance to ruin her mascara. Our mother sat beside her, rubbing her back in soothing circles.
“It’s not fair,” Beatrice whispered.
“I didn’t mean for it to go this far. Daddy, you promised I’d be okay.”
“I am fixing it,” my father said, his tone tender when he spoke to her, cold granite when he looked at me. “But I can’t fix it without cooperation.”
He said the last word like a warning.
I finally reached for the folder.
It was heavier than it looked, or maybe my hands were shaking more than I wanted them to. The name on the first page was Beatrice’s—her company, her accounts, her signature, her mess. Next to her name were numbers that would make any auditor sit up straight.
I skimmed through dates, wire transfers, investor names. I recognized some of the banks. I recognized some of the tricks.
I recognized the smell of rot.
“They’ll trace this,” I said quietly, flipping through the pages.
“The IRS isn’t completely asleep, you know.”
“That’s why we need a narrative,” my father replied. “A fall person. Someone who… mismanaged things.
Someone who can plead guilty, do a short stint, pay a little restitution, and put this behind us.”
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
