My name is Charity Lawson, and on my sixteenth birthday, the man who raised me threw a ten-dollar bill onto the kitchen table and told me to get out of his house. He thought it was the ultimate insult, the final humiliation that would break me completely. He thought those words would destroy me.
Instead, I picked up the money, put it in my pocket, smiled softly, and handed him an envelope I’d been carrying for three weeks. An envelope that would change everything. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
To understand what happened that morning, you need to understand what I discovered three weeks earlier, on a Tuesday afternoon that looked like any other Tuesday but ended up being the day my entire life came into focus. The house on South Hill was supposed to be empty. Lester worked until six at his insurance office downtown.
My aunt Vicki—his sister who’d moved in after my mother died when I was four—had book club on Tuesdays. My half-brother Knox had hockey practice. I’d come home early because our study group had been cancelled, planning to finish my chemistry homework in the quiet of my room, a converted storage space on the second floor that still had boxes stacked in the corners and smelled perpetually of mothballs and forgotten things.
I was halfway up the stairs, chemistry textbook under my arm, when I heard Vicki’s voice drifting from the kitchen. Sharp and anxious in a way that made me freeze mid-step, one hand on the banister, suddenly aware that I was holding my breath. “I’m telling you, Lester, she’s getting suspicious.” Vicki’s words carried that particular edge she got when she was worried about something, when the careful facade of our household was showing cracks.
“Yesterday she asked why Knox gets new equipment every season while she’s wearing clearance rack clothes from three years ago. She’s starting to notice the difference.”
“So what?” Lester’s voice was dismissive in that way I knew so well, the tone that said the conversation was beneath him. “She’s always been sensitive about money.
Jealous of her brother. It’s natural sibling rivalry.”
“She’s sixteen now, Lester. Old enough to ask real questions.
Old enough to go looking for answers if we don’t give her good ones.”
The sound of glass on wood—someone pouring a drink. Probably Lester with his afternoon bourbon, the one he thought no one knew about. “There’s nothing for her to find.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
