Chapter 2 - The Mask Slipped
Down on the ground in Austin, the heat outside was hovering at ninety-four degrees, but inside the sprawling, two-story suburban home Marcus and Clara had built together, the air felt subzero.
Sarah remained locked inside the hallway half-bath, her back pressed against the wood paneling, her breath hitching in her chest. Through the narrow crack beneath the door, she could hear the rhythmic, sickening scrape of Clara’s fiberglass casts dragging against the tile floor.
“Phyllis, please… I feel faint. My head… I haven’t had water since Marcus left at six this morning,” Clara’s voice pleaded, small and raspy.
“You’ll get water when you peel those potatoes and slice the onions for the hash,” Phyllis replied, her voice entirely flat. “You’ve spent five days lying on that sofa like a queen while my son runs himself into an early grave working for your lifestyle. The least you can do is show some gratitude to his relatives.”
Sarah unlocked the bathroom door and stepped out, her knuckles white around her phone. Her pulse was hammering in her ears. She was only twenty-two, an art student who had spent her entire life terrified of Aunt Phyllis’s razor-sharp tongue. In the Vance-Montgomery family, nobody crossed Phyllis. Phyllis controlled the family trusts, Phyllis dictated who sat where at Christmas, and Phyllis had spent thirty years cutting out anyone who dared question her authority.
“Aunt Phyllis,” Sarah said, stepping between the elderly woman and the woman on the floor. Her voice shook, but she planted her sneakers firmly on the grout line. “Stop this. Right now. Look at her! She’s shivering. She has a fever!”
Phyllis slowly turned around, holding an eight-inch German chef’s knife she had been using to trim fat from a brisket. She looked down at Sarah, her perfectly arched eyebrows lifting in condescending amusement.
“Sarah, sweetheart,” Phyllis said, her tone dripping with mock sweetness. “Didn’t your mother teach you that little girls don’t interrupt grown women in their own domestic affairs?”
“This isn’t your domestic affair!” Sarah shouted, her voice rising above the hum of the refrigerator. “This is Clara and Marcus’s house! You don’t live here!”
Phyllis took a step forward, the knife resting loosely in her manicured hand. “Marcus is my son. Everything Marcus owns, he owns because I gave him life and the connections to succeed. Clara is a lab assistant from an orphanage who managed to trap him with pretty eyes and sob stories. Now, if you want me to continue paying your studio tuition at the university next semester, you will turn around, go into the living room, and set the table for fourteen.”
Clara reached up from the floor, her fingers brushing the hem of Sarah’s jeans. “Sarah… don’t… please. Don’t let her hurt your school…”
Sarah looked down at Clara. The sight broke her heart.
Clara had married Marcus four years ago. When Marcus’s first logistics company was on the brink of bankruptcy during the pandemic, Clara had secretly sold the small plot of land left to her by her biological grandmother—the only thing she possessed in the world—and wired Marcus the eighty-five thousand dollars to clear his company payroll. She had asked Marcus never to tell his mother, knowing Phyllis’s pride would never accept that an “orphan” had rescued the Montgomery family name.
And now, here Clara lay, treated like a stray dog.
“I don’t care about the tuition,” Sarah whispered, her jaw tightening.
Sarah knelt down beside Clara on the cold floor, wrapping her arms under Clara’s shoulders. “I’m helping you up.”
“Don’t touch her!” Phyllis hissed, stepping closer. “She needs to finish this!”
“Or what, Aunt Phyllis? You’re going to stab me with that knife?” Sarah looked directly into her aunt’s cold, gray eyes.
Phyllis scoffed, crossing her arms and laying the knife on the counter. “Dramatic child. Just like your mother. Go ahead. Try to lift her. Her legs weigh thirty pounds in those casts. You’ll drop her and break her surgical pins, and when Marcus gets back, I will tell him *you* caused her internal bleeding.”
Sarah paused, realizing the horrifying truth: Phyllis was calculating. She was looking for an excuse, an accident, a catastrophe that could be pinned on anyone else.
Sarah looked toward the kitchen island.
There, half-concealed beneath a copy of *Southern Living* magazine, sat the blue-and-gold legal folder Marcus had noticed from the plane. Beside it was Clara’s iPhone, turned completely off, along with two dark amber prescription bottles.
“Why do you have her medicine over there?” Sarah demanded. “The hospital instructions said she needs her pain management every four hours. Marcus left at six. It’s almost one o’clock!”
“Those pills are narcotics,” Phyllis said smoothly, picking up a silver basting spoon. “They make her irrational. Addictive personalities run in her class of people. As the matriarch of this family, I am simply ensuring she doesn’t develop a dependency while under my roof.”
“This isn’t your roof!” Sarah screamed.
Clara gasped, her eyes rolling back slightly as a wave of post-traumatic pain surged through her lower spine and pelvis. Her body went limp against Sarah’s chest.
“Clara! Clara, look at me!” Sarah panicked, tapping Clara’s pale cheek. Clara’s skin was burning hot to the touch; a post-operative fever was clearly setting in.
Phyllis didn’t even glance down. She merely looked at the clock above the oven.
“One o’clock,” Phyllis murmured, wiping her hands on an embroidered kitchen towel. “Greg and Linda will be here in twenty minutes. If the table isn’t set, Sarah, you’ll be explaining to your cousins why there’s no Sunday dinner.”
Sarah pulled her phone from her back pocket, her fingers slick with sweat.
A new message from Marcus illuminated the screen:
*I am on the tarmac at O’Hare. I just bought the last first-class ticket on American Flight 2104 returning directly to Austin. Departs in thirty-five minutes. Lands at Austin Bergstrom at 3:10 PM. Sarah, do not let her force Clara to sign anything. Keep Clara alive. Nathan Vance is already mobilizing.*
Sarah held the phone close to her chest, looking at Clara’s unconscious form, then looking up at Phyllis, who was humming a hymn while basting the brisket.
“She’s not going to sign,” Sarah whispered.
Phyllis stopped humming and turned her head slowly. “What did you say?”
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“I said,” Sarah stood up, her small frame trembling with absolute defiance, “she’s not going to sign your conservatorship papers, Phyllis. Not today. Not ever.”
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