All the color just vanished from Greg’s face. His phone slipped right out of his fingers and shattered on the concrete.
Without missing a beat, Ms. Richards grabbed an extension cord and hooked up the old television. A second later, dad’s face flickered onto the screen, sitting right at his workbench with the unfinished pieces of the crib behind him.
“Greg,” Dad said, “I told you three times to tell Chloe the truth. You gave me your word.”
Greg tried to bolt down the driveway, but I stepped right into his path, cutting him off. “No,” I said. “You wanted everyone here to see this. You’re staying.”
What played out over the next few minutes made my stomach violently heave. Greg hadn’t been protecting me from the world all these years. He had been locking me away from it.
He told me Aunt Sandy wanted peace and quiet on her birthday. He told Aunt Sandy I’d run away. He told Sadie I didn’t want to go to her wedding. He swore up and down we couldn’t do Thanksgiving because Uncle Nolan was bedridden. Every single time I sat at home alone, eating dinner in my sweatpants and trying to be polite by giving everyone space, Greg was spinning another lie just to keep us apart.
And that wasn’t even the worst of it. While he was quietly cooking the books for dad’s accounts, he’d been shaking down Aunt Sandy, Nolan, and Sadie for cash, bleeding them dry with fake medical bills and made-up emergencies like a leaking roof.
Standing there in the driveway, watching the horror wash over my family’s faces, the whole puzzle finally clicked. Greg wasn’t sweating because of some handmade baby furniture. He was sweating because, for the first time in five years, we were all standing in the exact same spot, actually talking to each other and comparing notes. He had isolated me from the entire family on purpose, just so he could be the golden child everyone trusted with everything.
That evening at home, just Joshua and me, we put in the other tape.
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No happy endings on that one. Just Dad, sounding bone-tired and full of regret, saying he completely got it wrong. He thought I was just independent, thought Greg was just eager to help, and figured silence would fix everything. Instead, it let Greg tear us all apart.
Four months later, we hosted Thanksgiving. We put that rocking chair right by the window where the afternoon sun hit the moon carvings.
Greg showed up with a cheap grocery-store pie, looking small and miserable. Halfway through dinner, when Aunt Sandy mentioned some old memory, Greg started to jump in with his usual story. He stopped dead in his tracks.
No excuses. No spin.
He just looked her in the eye and finally told the truth.
There were no claps; it was not a movie. We ate, and later Greg stood up and went to the sink to clean the dirty plates, without creating a fuss. For years, my brother had dictated everything that people thought about me. But on that particular evening, he was only washing dishes, and it was the first time after Dad died that I had a sense of belonging back in my life.
