Ninety seconds later I canceled every payment keeping my sister’s perfect life alive — and a week after that, I finally read the tuition invoices I’d been paying for six years without checking, because the bookkeeper never audits her own sister.
PART 1
The candles were still burning when Brody Halvorsen ruined my son’s birthday.
Eight tiny flames flickered on a baseball-diamond cake in the rented party room at the Harbor Heights Community Hall.
Sam, my eight-year-old son, stood behind it with his cheeks puffed, ready to make his wish.
He’d been planning the wish for a week.
He wouldn’t tell me what it was, but he’d been carrying his grandfather’s old catcher’s mitt around the apartment for the same week, so I had a guess.
Then Brody, my eleven-year-old nephew, sprinted across the hardwood floor, jumped, and landed with both sneakers in the middle of the cake.
