Chapter 6 - The Sister's Plea
Three days after her arrest, Tessa was released on a $25,000 unsecured bail, paid for by her friend Kayla’s family.
She wasn't allowed within five hundred feet of my parents' house or my home, under the terms of a temporary restraining order my father and I had both filed. But on Friday evening, as I was walking to my car in the dental clinic parking lot after work, a dark sedan pulled up behind my vehicle, blocking me in.
The door opened, and Tessa stepped out.
She looked dreadful. Her hair was messy, her eyes red and swollen, and she was wearing a plain gray sweatshirt. The glamour and confidence she had displayed at the party were completely gone.
“Gina! Please, don't run!” she cried out, taking two steps toward me before stopping, remembering the restraining order distance. “I just need two minutes!”
I stood beside my driver’s side door, my keys tucked between my knuckles. “You’re violating your bail conditions, Tessa. Move your car or I call Detective Miller.”
“They’re going to give me three years, Gina!” she sobbed, burying her face in her hands. “The prosecutor offered a plea deal today—thirty-six months in state prison! I can't do prison, Gina! You know I can't!”
“You should have thought about that before you stole $65,000,” I said flatly.
“I’ll pay it back!” she begged, dropping to her knees on the asphalt, just like she had on the courthouse steps in my nightmares. “I’ll get two jobs! I’ll give you every paycheck! Just go to the DA and tell them you want to drop the theft charges! If you drop your $18,000 charge, the total falls below the major felony threshold! I could get probation!”
I looked down at my younger sister—the girl whose river project I had repaired at twelve, whose private school bills had taken my college fund at eighteen, and whose fake illness had taken my baby’s future at thirty-five.
“Why did you do it, Tessa?” I asked quietly, the question I had held inside for months finally coming out. “Why the fake cancer? Why take my IVF money?”
Tessa looked up, her face twisted with a mixture of tears and sudden, ugly resentment.
“Because everybody always looked at you like you were the perfect one!” she spat out, her true feelings surfacing. “Gina the manager! Gina the responsible one! Gina who bought her own car and got married to a nice guy! Dad looked at you like you were his proudest achievement because you fixed that stupid truck with him!”
I stared at her, stunned.
“I wanted them to look at me the way they looked at you,” Tessa wept. “When I told Mom I was sick, she stopped looking at her phone and looked at me. Dad cried for me. For the first time in my life, I was the most important person in the room! And then you announced your stupid IVF, and everyone started talking about your baby! I couldn't let you take it back!”
The sheer, warped toxicity of her logic left me speechless. She had faked a terminal illness and stolen tens of thousands of dollars simply because she couldn't stand sharing our parents' attention.
“I’m not dropping the charges, Tessa,” I said, my voice cold, steady, and entirely free of hesitation. “You didn't just steal money. You stole time. You stole my chance to have a child when my reserve was high. You belong in prison.”
May you like
I pulled out my phone and dialed Detective Miller's direct number on speaker.
Tessa’s eyes widened in terror. She scrambled back into her car, slammed the door, and reversed out of the parking lot at top speed, her tires screeching against the pavement.
