Chapter 4Taming The Sisters Who Scorned Me

I couldn't quit. Not yet. Between Bennett’s "hush money" and the sisters’ exorbitant salary—they paid me nearly $8,000 a month just because I was "reliable"—I was finally solving my family’s problems. My father’s dialysis was covered. My mother could finally breathe.

So I played the part. When Maisie cried for Bennett, I texted him.

Please, just send her something, I wrote.

Dude, I’m literally seeing a girl who’s a literal countess right now, Bennett replied. Just tell her I’m buried in grad school work. Make something up.

I told her he was studying. She laughed, a bitter, hollow sound. "Bennett never studied a day in his life. He bought his way into a degree. Try again, Casey."

Eventually, I begged him for a voice note.

"Hey Maisie, you little brat," Bennett’s voice boomed through the phone, bright and effortless as always. "I’m grinding over here so I can come home a success. Wait for me, okay? Miss you."

Maisie saved that clip. She played it until her phone battery died, over and over, huddled in the dark of her room.

Did she really love him that much?

I remembered her buying him a $20,000 diamond watch for his eighteenth birthday and tossing me a twenty-dollar bill for the "delivery fee." That was my value in her eyes. The price of a pizza.

On my own eighteenth birthday, I was alone in a classroom at midnight, finishing the homework Bennett and Maisie had dumped on my desk so they could go out for omakase. I remember looking at a small potted ivy on the windowsill, the moonlight turning the leaves silver.

I had whispered Happy Birthday to the plant.

I told myself they were good people. Maisie had saved me from bullies once. Bennett had given me a path to a better education. I forced myself to be grateful. I suppressed the jealousy until it felt like a dull ache I could ignore.

The moon is in the sky, and I am on the ground. I never reached for it. And even when the light hit me, I knew it didn't belong to me.