Don’t be stupid, Mia, the last text from my younger brother, Ethan, read. If you show up today and say a word, those collectors aren’t going to care that you just got a piece of paper. They know where your new apartment is. Turn around. Go home. Let Mom and Dad handle this.
I stared at the words, a bitter taste flooding my mouth. Handle this. That was their polite family shorthand for destroying my life to save his.
“Mia?” A soft knock on the server room door made me flinch. The heavy metal door creaked open, revealing Chloe, my roommate and the only person in the world who knew the sheer, terrifying gravity of what I was about to do. She slipped inside, the heavy black audiovisual lanyard around her neck clinking against the zipper of her unfastened graduation gown.
“They’re actively looking for you,” Chloe whispered, her eyes wide with a mixture of fear and adrenaline. “I just walked past the main quad. Your parents actually did it. They called campus security. I overheard two guards saying they were looking for a female student, five-foot-four, dark hair, reportedly experiencing a ‘severe psychological break’ and possibly armed.”
A hollow laugh escaped my lips before I could stop it. “Armed? With what? A liberal arts degree?”
“It’s not funny, Mia,” Chloe said, grabbing my shoulders. “They’re trying to get you detained before you can even cross the stage. They want you locked in a campus holding cell until the ceremony is over. If they find you, they won’t let you speak. They’ll just drag you away.”
I closed my eyes, leaning my head against the cold metal racks of the servers. This was the scorched-earth tactic I should have anticipated. For twenty-two years, my parents, Richard and Eleanor Bennett, had meticulously curated the image of a flawless, upper-middle-class family. I was the anomaly—the quiet, overly studious daughter who didn’t fit into their country club aesthetic. Ethan, on the other hand, was the golden boy. He could do no wrong, even when his “startup ventures” inevitably collapsed, swallowing tens of thousands of dollars.
But it wasn’t until my sophomore year that I realized how deep the rot truly went.
I had been working two jobs to cover my tuition, subsisting on instant ramen and four hours of sleep, only to have my debit card declined for a three-dollar coffee. A frantic call to the bank revealed a nightmare: my credit score was decimated. Three massive federal student loans, alongside several maxed-out credit cards, had been taken out using my Social Security number. The funds had vanished into a joint account controlled by my parents.
When I finally secured a pro-bono financial investigator, the truth we unearthed was suffocating. Ethan didn’t just have bad business sense. He had a crippling, violent gambling addiction. He had borrowed heavily from a syndicate of illicit lenders—the kind of men who didn’t send politely worded letters to a collection agency, but rather sent silent, heavy-set men to wait by your car at night. To save their precious son from having his legs shattered, my parents didn’t just steal my identity. They pawned my future. They threw me to the wolves to buy Ethan time.
And today, they were going to finalize my destruction.
