Auditing My Brother’s Fake DreamChapter 3

I checked into a budget hotel near my office. Before I could even catch my breath, my mother called, hysterical.

"Natalie, your father has lost his mind," she sobbed. "He’s throwing everything you left behind into the trash. He found that old box you hid under the sofa."

My heart stopped. That box contained my ledgers. Ever since I started working, I’d kept a meticulous record of every cent I’d spent on the family—every utility bill, every time I’d paid off Tyler’s credit cards, every medical bill for Arthur. It was my insurance policy.

"What is he doing?" I whispered.

"He says you were spying on him. He says you kept these records just to hold them over his head like a debt collector. He’s in the living room now, screaming, saying he’s going to burn them."

I hung up and hailed a cab. That ledger was my final line of defense. I couldn't let it turn to ash.

When I burst through the front door, the house smelled of scorched paper. Arthur was hunched over a metal trash can in the center of the living room. He was tearing pages out of my ledger, one by one, and dropping them into the flames.

"Record-keeping? You really are a piece of work, Natalie!" He looked at me with pure disgust. "Every time you bought your brother a canvas, you wrote it down. Every time you bought your mother her heart medication, you recorded it. You even kept track of the money I spent on my antique vases?"

He stood up, throwing the mangled remains of the book at my face. "You’re part of this family! Contributing isn't a loan, it’s a duty! You’ve been calculating against your own father since you were twenty!"

Beatrice was there too, of course. "It’s pathological, Arthur. Imagine the darkness in a child’s heart to keep a tab on her own parents. She was waiting for us to fail just so she could collect."

Tyler stayed behind the sofa, his eyes flickering. He knew that at least sixty percent of those entries were to bail him out of trouble. The time he dinged the neighbor's Lexus. The time he got caught with a fake ID at a club. The expensive oil paints he bought on my card and never used.

I picked up the charred, fragmented pages from the floor.

"Arthur, there is a total of two hundred and thirty-four thousand dollars in those records," I said, my voice steady. "That is five years of my life. I kept records because I knew you’d never pay me back. I kept records because I wanted to remember who I was in this house—a bank, not a daughter."

Arthur lunged for the pages in my hand. "Give me those! I’m ordering you to burn the rest! Then you’re going to the bank and withdrawing your savings as compensation for the years I raised you!"

He actually pulled out a lighter, flicking the flame inches from my sleeve. "Burn them, or I’ll burn the clothes off your back!"

Looking at his crazed, desperate face, the last shred of my affection for him evaporated. He was willing to destroy his daughter for a phantom dream.

I stepped back and pulled up a folder on my phone.

"You want to see Tyler’s art, Dad? Fine. Let’s take a real look."

Tyler’s face went pale. He tried to grab my phone, but I dodged him. "Look closely, Dad. This is the 'genius' you're willing to go homeless for."