My name is Brittany Lawson, and until three weeks ago, I thought the most exciting part of my life was convincing my landlord to fix the leak under my kitchen sink. I’m thirty-three years old, working as an administrative assistant at a regional logistics company in Cleveland that nobody’s ever heard of. I live in a small apartment with thin walls, drive a ten-year-old Honda Civic with a dent I’ve been meaning to fix, and eat meal-prepped lunches at my desk while my coworkers gossip about things I’m not included in.
I live what most people would call a boring life. I call it stable. Predictable.
Safe. But there’s one thing about me that’s always caused problems in my family: I read everything. Contracts, receipts, fine print, terms and conditions.
The paragraphs of tiny text that everyone else scrolls past without thinking. I ask questions when numbers don’t add up. I keep records.
I don’t sign anything without understanding exactly what I’m agreeing to. At work, my coworkers call me “the detail queen” and mean it as a compliment. They bring me invoices with discrepancies, contracts they don’t understand, spreadsheets that won’t balance.
I catch the errors they miss, notice when dates don’t match, spot the missing signatures that could cost the company thousands. My family calls me paranoid. Suspicious.
Difficult. What I didn’t know three weeks ago, standing in an insurance office with my hands shaking and my world turning upside down, was that this annoying, paranoid, difficult habit was exactly why my grandmother chose me. Why she left me everything.
Why she spent the last year of her life building a fortress around a secret worth $1.8 million—a secret my own sister had been trying to steal for three years. In my family, there have always been two daughters: the golden one and the other one. I’ve always been the other one.
Growing up, my sister Ashley was the performer—school plays, dance recitals, student council president, homecoming court. She learned early that attention was currency, and she collected it like other kids collected Pokemon cards. Every room she walked into became her stage.
I was the kid who caused no trouble, created no drama. I did my homework, kept my head down, tried not to take up too much space. Teachers forgot my name by the end of the semester.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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