PART 2: The Cloud Never Forgets
I stood on the front porch, the two crisp one-hundred-dollar bills my mother had shoved at me burning a hole in my palm. The heavy oak door had clicked shut, a final, definitive barrier between the life I had built and the family that had just erased me. The scent of Sheila’s rubbing alcohol still clung to my clothes, a humiliating perfume that masked the scent of the home I had bled to pay for.
I walked down the steps, my legs trembling, and collapsed onto the worn wooden bench near the garden—the very garden I had planted with my own two hands. I pulled out my cheap, prepaid smartphone. My fingers were shaking as I connected to the neighbor’s unsecured Wi-Fi. For two years in that concrete cell, I had clung to one single anchor: my family loved me. I had taken the fall for Austin’s devastating embezzlement charge from the corporate firm where we both worked, believing his sobbing plea that he would never survive prison. I did it because I was the "strong one."
But the coldness in Austin’s eyes, the cruelty in Sheila’s voice, and my parents' absolute indifference shattered that illusion. I needed answers.
Before I was indicted, I had installed a discrete, voice-activated security camera tucked inside the living room bookshelf to keep an eye on our elderly dog while I was working long shifts at the fabric store. The dog had passed away during my first year inside, but as I opened the dormant cloud app on my phone, my heart skipped a beat.
The camera was still active.
I scrolled back through the archived footage. The timeline was flooded with mundane clips—my father watching TV, my mother vacuuming. But my thumb froze on a clip timestamped just twenty-four hours earlier. The night before my release.
I pressed play, lifting the phone to my ear.
The living room was illuminated by a single lamp. Austin and Sheila were sitting on the sofa, a bottle of expensive champagne between them. My mother was pacing the floor.
“She’s getting out tomorrow,” my mother’s voice trembled. “What if she asks about the deed, Austin? What if she demands her half?”
“Let her demand whatever she wants,” Sheila sneered, taking a sip of champagne. “The house is entirely in Austin’s name now. You signed the transfer documents six months ago, Abigail. Summer is a convicted felon. No judge in Franklin County is going to take her word over ours.”
My breath hitched. They hadn't just taken my room. They had legally stolen my home.
Then, Austin spoke. The brother I had sacrificed my freedom for let out a cruel, dismissive laugh.
“I can’t believe she actually served the whole two years without saying a word,” Austin said, shaking his head. “I told you she was naive. When I siphoned that seventy thousand dollars from the firm’s accounts, I thought I was dead meat. But crying on her shoulder? Telling her the mob was going to kill me? It worked like a charm.”
“You’re a genius, babe,” Sheila cooed, kissing his cheek. “But we have to be smart tomorrow. We treat her like garbage. Make her feel like a pariah. If we make the environment toxic enough, she’ll leave on her own. And more importantly, she won’t go snooping around the basement where we hid the rest of the embezzled cash.”
I lowered the phone, my vision blurring with hot, angry tears.
There was no mob. There was no life-threatening debt. Austin had stolen that money out of pure greed to fund his lifestyle with Sheila. He had manipulated me into confessing, letting me rot in a six-by-eight cell while they lived in the house I paid for, sleeping on the mattress I bought, drinking champagne bought with stolen funds.
May you like
The sorrow that had been suffocating me evaporated. In its place, a brilliant, terrifying rage ignited in my chest. They wanted a criminal? They wanted a monster?
They were about to see exactly what two years in a state penitentiary teaches a woman about survival.
