Chapter 8 - The Reality of "Friends
The front door closed between us before Shay could unleash another plea.
I didn't take pleasure in seeing her cry. There is no joy in watching someone experience the brutal collapse of their illusions. But I knew that if I softened now—if I wrote the check, smoothed over the rough edges, and allowed her back onto my payroll—she would spend the rest of her adult life convinced that boundaries were negotiable and that other people existed merely to absorb her consequences.
Over the weekend, Darcy tried to orchestrate an intervention. He invited his brother and two of Shay's godparents over to our house without my consent.
When I arrived home from a Saturday charity gala, I found four people sitting in my formal living room, drinking my wine, looking like a tribunal prepared to pass judgment.
"Elena," Darcy's brother, Mark, started, standing up with an air of grave authority. "We need to talk about family solidarity. You're a wealthy woman. What you're doing to this girl is cruel."
I didn't even take off my coat. I walked directly over to the wall console and tapped the security system.
"You have two minutes to leave my private residence," I said, looking Mark dead in the eye. "If you are not across the property line in one hundred and twenty seconds, the silent alarm will dispatch private armed security."
"Elena!" Darcy sputtered, jumping up. "They're my family!"
"This house was purchased six years before I met you, Darcy," I said, my voice dropping an octave, ringing with authority. "Your name is not on the deed. Your name is not on the property tax assessment. You are a guest in this house whose welcome is hanging by a microscopic thread. To your family: get out."
Mark looked at Darcy, waiting for him to assert himself. But Darcy had no ground to stand on, and they all knew it. Within sixty seconds, the room was empty.
Meanwhile, Shay was learning the hardest lesson of her young life across town.
Deprived of her car and her credit cards, she had turned to her sorority sisters and social circle for help. For years, Shay had been the "rich girl" of the group—the one who booked the VIP booths in downtown clubs, covered the bottomless mimosas at brunch, and drove everyone to weekend wine tours in her Audi.
When she asked two of her closest friends if she could crash on their couch until she figured out her living situation, one claimed her lease strictly prohibited overnight guests, and the other stopped answering her texts entirely.
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When she posted a crowdfunding link on her Instagram to raise the $14,850 for her tuition, she raised exactly sixty-five dollars in forty-eight hours—forty of which came from an elderly aunt.
Her friends weren't friends. They were passengers on an all-expenses-paid cruise. And the moment the ship ran out of fuel, they jumped into the lifeboats without looking back.
