Chapter 7 - The Skeletons of Lexington
Over the next two weeks, the aftershocks of the party rippled through Lexington with devastating efficiency.
Living in Allston gave me an objective, detached vantage point. I picked up thirty hours a week stocking shelves and running the register at an independent bookstore in Brookline, saving every tip and paycheck while waiting for the fall semester to start. But news from the suburbs had a way of filtering through.
My high school friend Chloe, whose mother was a member of the same garden club as Meredith, met me at a diner in Coolidge Corner on a rainy Tuesday afternoon.
“Rowan, you have no idea what it’s like back there right now,” Chloe said, blowing steam off her mug of black coffee. “The gossip has completely eclipsed everything else. My mom said Meredith hasn’t shown her face at the tennis pavilion since Saturday.”
“Is Dad still going to work?” I asked, slicing into a plate of pancakes.
“He is, but people are whispering,” Chloe said, lowering her voice. “Two of the board members from the country club withdrew their commercial accounts from his firm on Monday. Arthur Hensley was telling everyone at the grill room that Thomas tried to borrow fifty grand from him in the parking lot right after you left the stage.”
I stopped chewing. “Dad asked Arthur for fifty thousand dollars?”
“In cash or a certified cashier's check,” Chloe nodded solemnly. “Hensley told him to go through the bank’s formal underwriting process, which was basically a polite way of telling him to jump into a lake. And Ethan... oh God, Rowan, Ethan is having a total meltdown.”
“What happened to Ethan?”
“He showed up at a house party in Belmont over the weekend driving that beat-up 3 Series,” Chloe explained, half-laughing, half-cringing. “Everyone was asking where the new Audi was. Some guys from the lacrosse team started chanting *‘Where’s your envelope, Ethan?’* He ended up getting into a fistfight with a kid from Lexington High and got thrown out. He’s telling everyone that you stole his inheritance and that his family is suing you for fraud.”
“Let him sue,” I said, feeling a strange, cold detachment settling over me. “Grandpa Samuel’s lawyer is already three moves ahead of them.”
“Aren’t you scared, though?” Chloe asked, reaching across the table to touch my arm. “Your dad has connections. He knows judges, bank presidents, city councilors.”
“Connections don’t pay mortgages when the balance sheet is red, Chloe,” I replied. “And connections don’t overwrite a legally binding trust executed six months before Samuel died. Dad used fear to rule our house because he didn't have anything real underneath it. The moment I said ‘no’ in front of seventy people, his entire empire turned into paper.”
When I returned to my Allston studio that evening, I sat down at my laptop and began digging through public business records on the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s corporate database.
What I found was staggering.
Keller Commercial Capital was registered as a limited liability partnership, but over the last eighteen months, Thomas had filed four separate amendments pledging personal assets as security for mezzanine loans. The house in Lexington—the pristine, white-shuttered colonial with the blooming hydrangeas—had a secondary equity line taken against it in November for four hundred thousand dollars.
The lavish lifestyle wasn't just built on vanity; it was built on an avalanche of impending foreclosure.
He had wanted Grandpa Samuel’s two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to plug a dike that was already disintegrating. He had planned to use my college education to buy thirty more days of pretense, hoping some hail-mary investment would save him before Ethan discovered the Audi was leased on borrowed time.
I stared at the glowing screen, the clanking radiator in the corner the only sound in the dim room.
I felt no triumph. Only a profound, sorrowful clarity. My parents hadn't chosen Ethan because they loved him more; they had chosen him because he was an extension of their vanity. And they hadn't discarded me because I was unlovable; they had discarded me because I refused to be their sacrificial lamb.
A sudden, sharp knock rattled the door of my studio.
My heart jumped into my throat. The apartment building had a locked front vestibule, but tenants frequently propped the door open with a brick for food delivery drivers.
May you like
I stood up, keeping my footsteps silent on the linoleum, and crept toward the peephole.
Standing in the dimly lit hallway, his face shadowed by the flickering fluorescent bulb overhead, was Ethan.
