“Mom?” Ava’s voice broke through the ringing in my ears.
I looked up. Ava was standing by the kitchen island, staring down at her own smartphone. When she raised her head to look at me, her eyes were completely devoid of the childish innocence they had held just moments before. Her gaze was deep, dark, and weirdly, chillingly cold for a thirteen-year-old girl.
“Mom,” Ava repeated, her voice steady and flat. “You need to see this livestream.”
I walked around the counter, my legs feeling like they were made of lead. Ava turned the phone toward me. She was on Instagram, viewing the live story of one of Melanie’s closest, most vapid friends, a woman named Chloe who obsessively documented her every waking moment.
On the screen, my parents and my “severely sick” sister Melanie were sitting in a plush, circular leather booth at The Capital Grille—the most exclusive, expensive steakhouse in the city. They were dressed to the nines. My mother was wearing her pearls; my father had on his custom suit. They were laughing uproariously, holding up crystal flutes of champagne to toast the camera.
And then, the camera panned. Or rather, it caught the reflection in the massive, gold-leafed mirror hanging on the wall directly behind their booth.
I saw the person sitting at the head of their table. The person who had just paid for the three bottles of Dom Pérignon sitting in ice buckets next to them.
It was Jason.
He was smiling his signature, arrogant, million-dollar smile. He was wearing the navy blue cashmere sweater my mother had knitted for him for Christmas two years ago. Beside him sat his twenty-four-year-old mistress, practically sitting in his lap, laughing at a joke my father had just told.
They hadn’t just abandoned us. They had actively conspired to lie to me, leaving me and my daughter to sit in a house smelling of a feast we had slaved over, just so they could eat prime rib with the man who had destroyed our lives.
The phone trembled in my hand. Tears, hot and humiliating, pricked the corners of my eyes. I felt the familiar, suffocating weight of being utterly worthless to the people who were supposed to love me unconditionally.
But before the first tear could fall, Ava gently pulled the phone out of my hand.
“Mom, don’t you dare cry,” Ava said, her voice possessing a terrifying, surgical calm. She tapped the screen, shutting off the livestream, but not before her nimble thumbs had hit a few other buttons. “Sit down. Pour yourself a glass of wine. Let me handle this.”
Without waiting for my response, she turned on her heel and marched into her bedroom, her laptop already open on her desk. Fifteen minutes later, as I sat numbly at the island clutching a glass of Cabernet, I heard our doorbell ring.
