Chapter 7 - The Sister's Betrayal
By 8:00 AM the next morning, the waiting room at the hospital had filled with an unexpected visitor. My older sister, Rebecca, whom I hadn't seen in nearly five years since she abruptly moved to the West Coast and cut off all communication with the family, was sitting in the corner booth holding a large paper folder.
"Ethan," she said, standing up and throwing her arms around my neck the moment she saw me walk through the automatic doors. "Lena called me. She told me what happened in the office. I took the first flight out of Seattle."
"Rebecca..." I whispered, the exhaustion finally starting to crack my composure. "Why are you here? You swore you'd never come back to this state."
"I came back because I made the mistake of staying silent five years ago," she said, sitting me down on the bench and opening the folder. Inside were certified copies of medical records from a hospital in San Francisco dated 2021. "Look at the dates, Ethan. This was my husband, Mark... he didn't leave me because of financial infidelity like Mother told you. He left because Mother did the exact same thing to him when he threatened to expose her offshore accounts."
I stared at the pages, my breath catching in my throat as I read the clinical summaries. Patient reported severe neurological symptoms due to unauthorized administration of synthetic sedatives.
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"She wanted control of my inheritance, Ethan," Rebecca said, her tears dropping onto the old paper. "She told me I was weak, that I was a failure, and she used her legal team to bury Mark in litigation until he couldn't afford to fight anymore. I ran away to save my own sanity. I didn't tell you because I thought... I thought maybe she loved you more. Maybe she would be different with your marriage."
"She isn't different," I said, my hand closing over my phone containing the office video files. "She’s the exact same monster she’s always been. But this time, she’s dealing with both of us."
