WHEN I WAS IN SINGAPORE ON A BUSINESS TRIP, MY PARENTS LET MY SISTER MOVE INTO MY HOUSE WITHOUT ASKING. I was standing in a glass elevator forty floors above Singapore when my phone buzzed once, sharply, like a blade tapping my shoulder. A photo.
My living room, except it wasn’t mine anymore. Boxes everywhere. Clothes draped across the sofa I bought with my first bonus.
My sister smiling barefoot as if she’d always belonged there. The caption from my parents came seconds later, a casual cruelty wrapped in false cheer. “We’re making good use of your house.
You should be grateful.”
For a moment, the city below blurred into a smear of lights. I wasn’t angry. Not yet.
Anger is loud. What I felt was quieter. Something tightening, coiling, choosing its shape.
And just before the elevator doors opened, I whispered to no one, “They really shouldn’t have done that.”
Jay called home. No one picked up. Not my parents, not my sister.
Silence, intentional, practiced, rehearsed. They wanted me helpless across an ocean. They thought distance made me harmless.
At dinner with clients, I felt their eyes on me, noticing my distraction. They thought I was worried about business. They didn’t know that in my pocket sat a message that felt like a stranger breathing down my neck.
My mother finally replied hours later. “Your sister needed a place. Why are you making this difficult.”
No question mark, no apology, just entitlement.
Cold and familiar. Something was off, more off than usual. My sister and I weren’t close, but there was a time, brief, fragile, when I believed we could be.
I helped her pay off debts she pretended not to have. I defended her when my parents compared us like mismatched furniture. Every time she fell, I was the one who extended a hand.
Every time I climbed, she wondered why she wasn’t the one rising. But it started small. The strange “accidental” withdrawals from our shared childhood account.
The way my parents dismissed it as me remembering wrong. That was the first crack. Their latest message wasn’t a betrayal.
It was simply the part they hadn’t bothered to hide. When I checked my home security app, the cameras were offline, disabled. To do that, someone needed physical access.
They’d planned this. Old mail I hadn’t seen. Mortgage papers forwarded without permission.
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