Chapter 4 - The Three Sides of the Mirror
Ethan Song stopped dead in the middle of the green marble floor. His phone screen was still flashing with live chat messages—thousands of multicolored icons scrolling past at a speed the human eye shouldn't have been able to follow—but his fingers went completely still.
He looked at me. Then he looked at the checkered bag. Then his eyes drifted up to my face, fixing on the shape of my nose, the slight curve of my jaw, and the gray color of my eyes that matched his own beneath the platinum hair dye.
"Sister?" Ethan whispered, his voice losing the fast, rhythmic cadence of a professional online entertainer. "Gideon, what are you talking about? The old man said the woman from Chiapas didn't have any other kids. He said she lived alone."
"Our father lied about everything that happened in 2004, Ethan," Gideon said, walking back to his desk and picking up the thick, leather-bound folder that Harrison had left behind. "He didn't just buy the lawyers. He bought the administrative logs in Ohio. He paid a secondary trust to generate fake annual statements showing that our mother was living in luxury while she was actually living in a county where the average income is nineteen thousand dollars a year."
The elevator doors opened again with a soft chime. A third man stepped onto the marble.
He was older than Ethan but younger than Gideon, wearing a long black tailored overcoat over a dark velvet vest, his face familiar in a way that made my breath catch in my chest. He was the man from the bus posters—Julian Song. His dark hair was styled with a rough, deliberate messiness that looked like it belonged on a magazine cover, but his eyes were completely bloodshot, his skin pale under the professional makeup the studio had applied that morning.
"Is it true?" Julian asked. He didn't look at Gideon or Ethan. He walked straight toward me, his long, heavy coat swinging around his legs, his gaze fixed on my face with an intensity that felt like a camera lens focusing from six inches away. "Harrison’s assistant called my manager from the tunnel. He said she died in Portsmouth."
"She’s gone, Julian," I said, my voice barely carrying across the vast, empty space of the office. "She died on a Tuesday. It was raining."
Julian stopped two inches from me. He smelled of expensive cedarwood tobacco, stage makeup, and the cold winter air of the river. He reached out, his long, artistic fingers gently touching the hood of my gray sweatshirt, his thumb brushing against a small oil stain near the zipper.
"She used to wear a sweatshirt like this," Julian said, his voice dropping into a rough, gravelly whisper that sounded like he had been screaming for hours. "An old navy blue one from the state college. When she left the house in Lomas... she was holding me by the stairs, and she told me she was just going to the pharmacy to get my ear drops. She never came back."
"They wouldn't let her come back, Julian," I said, looking up into his famous, beautiful face that looked so much like my mother’s old polaroids it made my eyes smart. "The guards at the main gate told her if she set foot on the sidewalk again, they would use the family's custody filing to put her in the county jail for child endangerment. She didn't have a lawyer. She didn't have twenty dollars for a taxi. She walked five miles to the bus station with nothing but a small bag of clothes and me inside her."
Julian’s hand dropped from my hood. He turned toward Gideon, his eyes filling with a sudden, violent fire that looked like it could burn the glass walls right out of the frame.
"You knew," Julian hissed at his older brother. "You took over the estate management three years ago when the old man died, Gideon. You checked the trust audits every quarter. How did you miss a five-hundred-thousand-dollar annual annuity being diverted to a shell account in Delaware?"
"I didn't miss it, Julian," Gideon said, his voice low, cold, and entirely devoid of defense. "The money was being cleared through a secondary logistics firm owned by our uncle, Hector Song. He was using the funds to cover the interest on the shipping terminal leases in New Jersey. I thought... I thought she was drawing from the main trust through a different bank in Boston. I didn't verify the personal delivery records because the old man’s will had a non-disclosure clause that would have frozen the entire venture fund if we looked into the 2004 files before the five-year probate ended."
"Probate?" Ethan yelled, taking a step forward, his phone dropping face-down onto the green marble with a sharp clack. "You let our mother die in a shack because of a probate clause, Gideon? I have four million people watching me play games every night, and I didn't even know my own sister was eating rice and eggs in a kitchen with a broken roof! Do you know what the internet is going to do to us when this gets out?"
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"The internet isn't going to know anything, Ethan," Gideon said, his pale gray eyes fixing on the youngest boy until Ethan snapped his mouth shut. "Because if the public finds out what Hector did to our mother’s accounts, the Vanguard Group will face a federal fraud investigation before the markets open on Monday. We don't just lose the fund, Ethan. We lose the name. We lose everything Christopher Song built."
"Good," Julian said, his hand reaching down to grab the handles of my checkered plastic bag. "Let it burn. I'm taking her to the house in Gramercy. She’s not spending another minute inside a building that has our father’s seal on the door."
