The Uninvitation

The call came on a Tuesday evening, ten days before Christmas.

I should have known something was wrong the moment I saw all three names lighting up my phone screen at once—Mom, Dad, Clare. A group video call. My family didn’t do group calls unless something serious was happening. Interventions. Announcements. Bad news delivered with witnesses.

I was still recovering from the worst flu of my adult life, two weeks of fever and body aches that had left me weak and foggy-headed. My apartment was a disaster zone of used tissue boxes, cold mugs of tea, and blankets I’d barely emerged from. But I was finally feeling human again, and I’d been looking forward to Christmas. Two weeks at home after months of eighty-hour work weeks sounded like exactly what I needed.

I pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders and swiped to answer, forcing a smile. “Hi, everyone. I was just—”

“Scarlet.” My mother’s voice was thin and tight, cutting through whatever I was about to say. She wasn’t smiling. She sat on the formal living room sofa—the one we were never allowed to sit on as kids—with her back straight and her hands folded. My father sat beside her, staring at something just past the camera. My younger sister Clare lounged in the armchair, scrolling on her phone, looking bored.

Something cold slithered down my spine. “Mom, is everything okay?”

“Scarlet, dear,” she began, using that particular tone that always preceded bad news delivered with a smile, “we need to talk about Christmas.”

I clutched the blanket tighter. “Okay… what’s wrong? Did something happen?”

My father cleared his throat, still not looking directly at the camera. “Your mother and I have been talking, and with Clare’s situation, we’ve decided it’s just not a good year for you to come home.”

The words hung in the air, so cold and sterile that at first I didn’t understand them. “Not come home? What do you mean? I already have my flight booked. I wrapped all the presents.”

Clare let out an exasperated sigh loud enough for the microphone to catch. “Oh my God, Mom, just tell her. Stop trying to sugarcoat it.” She sat up, her perfectly made-up face filling her video window. “Look, Scarlet, I’m bringing my new boyfriend Julian home for Christmas, and he’s… well, he’s important.”

I blinked, my flu-addled brain struggling to process. “Important? Okay, that’s great, Clare. I’m looking forward to meeting him.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Clare snapped, her voice dripping with the particular condescension she’d perfected in high school. “He’s actually important. He’s not like anyone you know. He’s from a completely different world.”

My father shifted uncomfortably, finally speaking up. “What your sister means, Scarlet, is that he’s from a different class. A different social circle. His family is very prominent. We don’t want to… well, we don’t want there to be any awkwardness.”

The room seemed to tilt. The rain hammered against my windows. “Awkwardness? What does that have to do with me coming home for Christmas?”

Clare delivered the killing blow with a sneer, an ugly twist of her perfectly glossed lips. “Julian is used to a certain caliber of person, Scarlet. He moves in very exclusive circles. You just wouldn’t fit in. He doesn’t like being around… well, nobodies.”

Nobody.

The word landed like a physical blow, echoing in the silence of my apartment.

“And let’s be honest,” Clare continued, warming to her subject, clearly enjoying herself now, “your little office job is just sad. We don’t want him asking what you do for a living and having to make something up. It’s embarrassing. It’s just easier if you’re not there.”

I looked at my mother, waiting for her to jump in, to say this was a joke, to tell Clare she was being ridiculous. But my mother’s face was carefully neutral, strained with false politeness.

“It’s just for this one year, sweetheart,” she said in that bright, brittle voice. “This is very important for your sister. Julian could be the one. We’re having him stay for the entire Christmas week, and we want everything to be absolutely perfect. You understand, don’t you?”

I looked at my father. He was studying his fingernails like they were the most fascinating thing in the world.

I couldn’t breathe. The fog in my head wasn’t from the flu anymore. It was from shock, from disbelief, from a pain so acute it felt like my chest was cracking open.

I—Scarlet Vance, thirty-six years old, founder and CEO of TerraGlobal Strategies, a sustainable technology consulting firm that worked with half the Fortune 100—was being called a nobody. I, who had quietly paid off the mortgage on the very house they were sitting in. I, who had funded Clare’s vlogging “career” for three years, buying her cameras, paying her rent, leasing her car. I, who subsidized my parents’ comfortable early retirement, which they attributed to my father’s “shrewd investments.”

I was an embarrassment. My job was sad. I was going to ruin Christmas.

“I see,” I managed, my voice barely above a whisper.

Relief flooded my mother’s face. “Oh, I knew you’d understand. You’ve always been the practical one, Scarlet. We’ll make it up to you—maybe we can do a nice dinner together in February.”

“Maybe,” I said, the word hollow.

“Wonderful. Well, we have to run. We’re going shopping for a new centerpiece for the dining table. Julian is accustomed to a very high standard.” My mother’s finger hovered over the screen. “We love you, dear.”

The call ended. The screen went black.

I sat in the silence for a long time, listening to the rain pound against the windows and the hollow buzz of blood in my ears. The carefully wrapped presents I’d spent weeks selecting were stacked by my door—a rare first-edition poetry book for my mother, an expensive watch for my father, a top-of-the-line vlogging drone for Clare.

The rejection wasn’t just a change of plans. It was a verdict. And it hurt worse than any fever I’d suffered through in the past two weeks.

For the first few hours, I was numb. I curled under my blanket and stared at the dark city skyline beyond my window, watching the lights blur through tears I didn’t remember starting to cry.

Nobodies. Different class. We don’t want to embarrass ourselves.

The phrases looped through my mind, each repetition a fresh cut.

I thought about my life—the one they knew absolutely nothing about. I had chosen anonymity deliberately. When I founded TerraGlobal Strategies eight years ago, I did it quietly, building it from my spare bedroom, coding and designing sustainable energy systems until my fingers cramped and my eyes burned. I took all the risks, worked the brutal hours, built an empire from nothing. And I kept my name off the press releases. I let my COO be the public face of the company. I lived in a comfortable but understated apartment. I drove a reliable sedan. I wore well-made but quiet clothes that Clare would call boring.

Why? Because I’d seen what wealth did to people. How it corrupted them. And because, on some deep, childish level that I’d never quite grown out of, I wanted my family to love me for being just Scarlet. The practical one. The boring one. Not because I was successful or rich or powerful. I didn’t want them to love S. Vance, CEO. I wanted them to love their daughter, their sister.

It seemed I had catastrophically failed on both counts. They didn’t love just Scarlet. They were ashamed of her. They found her embarrassing. They wanted her gone.

The next day, the numbness gave way to something sharper. Colder. A simmering anger that burned away the fog in my head and left me thinking clearly for the first time in weeks.

I had to be sure. This couldn’t be real. They couldn’t actually mean it.

I sent a simple text to my mother: “Mom, I don’t understand. I can’t believe you’d do this to me. Please tell me what’s really going on.”

I watched the phone. The three little dots appeared, vanished, appeared again. She was typing, deleting, retyping. Finally, a message came through.

“Scarlet, you’re making this very difficult. You’re being selfish. Clare deserves this chance. Julian is a wonderful man from an excellent family, and this is her opportunity to finally be happy and settle down. Your father and I support her completely. Please don’t ruin this for her.”

Selfish.

The accusation was so spectacularly unjust I almost laughed. I—who had wired Clare five thousand dollars just last month for a vlogging trip to Bali she never actually took. I—who paid for my father’s emergency root canal last spring, all six thousand dollars of it. I—who had never asked for anything in return except to be allowed to come home for Christmas.

The coldness of my mother’s text, her pivot to painting me as the villain, was the final confirmation. This wasn’t a misunderstanding. This wasn’t a miscommunication. This was a calculated decision. They were trading me away for a chance at social advancement.

I sat at my desk, trying to focus on the flood of year-end reports and contracts filling my inbox. My eyes landed on an email chain from my executive assistant. Subject line: “New hire onboarding complete. Julian Rutherford, CFO.”

My blood went cold. Julian. It was a common name, but Rutherford—”from an excellent family,” “important,” “moves in exclusive circles”…

My fingers flew over the keyboard. I opened our secure HR portal and typed the name.

There he was.

Julian Rutherford, thirty-seven years old, recently poached from our biggest competitor after two months of grueling negotiations. My new chief financial officer, hired with a compensation package that was frankly staggering. He was brilliant. He was aggressive. He was, without question, the most important hire I’d made all year.

But here was the crucial detail: we had never met in person. My role as the anonymous CEO meant all my high-level interviews were conducted via secure video conference. He knew me only as “S. Vance”—a powerful, respected, slightly intimidating figure who appeared in a professionally lit home office with a wall of books and awards behind her.

He had never seen me like this—exhausted, wrapped in an old blanket, pale from being sick. He had never heard anyone call me Scarlet.

The realization hit me like a freight train.

My arrogant, status-obsessed family was uninviting me from Christmas to impress my own employee. They were trying to impress a man who worked for me. A man I had hired. A man whose paychecks I signed.

A slow, cold smile spread across my face. The hurt was still there, a heavy stone lodged in my chest. But it was joined now by something else. Something sharp and focused and strategic—the same feeling I got when I was about to win a difficult negotiation.

They were so worried about appearances, so desperate to seem important. They had forgotten one crucial thing: they had no idea who Julian Rutherford actually was. And more importantly, they had no idea who I was.

The memory came back sharp and clear, like it had happened yesterday instead of six years ago. My thirtieth birthday. That morning, I’d closed the TerraGlobal contract with the city of Stockholm—our first major international deal, worth millions, the moment I knew my company would not just survive but thrive. I was ecstatic, vibrating with excitement and adrenaline, desperate to share the news with someone.

I called home. My mother picked up on the third ring.

“Oh, hello, Scarlet. Is everything all right?”

“Everything is amazing, Mom. You won’t believe what just—”

“Scarlet, I can’t talk right now,” she cut me off, her voice dropping to a strained whisper. “It’s your sister. We’re dealing with a crisis.”

My joy evaporated instantly. “Clare? What’s wrong? Is she hurt?”

“She just got dumped by that lovely boy Alex. She’s absolutely heartbroken. Devastated. She won’t come out of her room.”

My father’s voice came on the line, gruff and impatient. “Your sister needs us right now, Scarlet. This is a real crisis. That office stuff of yours can wait. We need to focus on what’s actually important.”

I remember standing in my tiny office, the signed Stockholm contract on my desk, feeling about two inches tall. “That office stuff”—my life’s work, my biggest achievement, dismissed without a second thought.

I canceled the small celebration I’d planned with my team. I booked an emergency flight. I spent my thirtieth birthday on my parents’ sofa, listening to Clare sob hysterically over a guy she’d dated for three weeks. I took both Clare and my mother to a luxury spa for a “healing weekend” to help Clare recover. I paid for all of it. And they never asked—not once—what my amazing news had been.

That was the dynamic. It had always been the dynamic.

Clare was the sparkling one, the outgoing one, the charming one—and also deeply insecure and monumentally lazy. She’d failed out of two different college programs before deciding to become a lifestyle vlogger. Her entire profession consisted of posting carefully curated photos of cocktails on beaches and designer clothes to Instagram—all funded by wire transfers from her boring sister. My parents enabled her, dazzled by her superficial charm and terrified of her emotional outbursts.

And me? I was the serious one. The practical one. The dull one. Good with numbers. Responsible. Reliable. My reliability became my curse. I wasn’t a person to them. I was a utility. A safety net. An ATM that never complained and never asked questions.

And I had let them treat me that way for years.

I thought about last Thanksgiving. Clare had brought her new vlogging camera—the one I’d paid for—and filmed everything, narrating for her followers.

“We just have to get this shot,” she’d trilled, rearranging the centerpiece. “My audience is going to love this aesthetic.”

She’d turned the camera on me. I was sitting by the fire, reading a book about quantum computing.

“And here’s my big sister, Scarlet,” she’d announced in that sing-song voice. “Still single, still reading her nerd books.” She giggled, high and artificial. “God, Scarlet, your clothes. Don’t you ever buy anything fashionable? You look like you shop at a library used book sale.”

I’d looked down at my outfit—a simple dark gray cashmere turtleneck and well-fitted jeans. The turtleneck alone had cost more than her entire fast-fashion outfit, but it didn’t have a logo plastered across it. It was quiet. Understated.

“I like to be comfortable, Clare,” I’d said, not looking up from my book.

“So boring,” she’d stage-whispered, just loud enough for me to hear, before turning the camera to our father. “Daddy, tell my followers how proud you are of your influencer daughter.”

The performance of their lives was suffocating. They were obsessed with appearing wealthy, with seeming important. They had no interest in the quiet, difficult work of actually being successful. They wanted the props, the appearance, the social media aesthetic.

And now they had what they thought was the ultimate prop: Julian Rutherford. They saw him as their ticket to the “different class” they so desperately craved. And to secure that prize, they needed to cut out the one piece of their lives that didn’t fit the new narrative they were constructing.

Me. The nobody. The sad office worker. The walking reminder of the lower-middle-class life they were so desperate to escape.

The cruelty was deliberate. It wasn’t enough to uninvite me. They had to degrade me first, to justify their decision by tearing me down. “He doesn’t like being around nobodies.” Clare’s voice, but the family’s sentiment.

I closed my laptop. The anger was so pure, so cold, it was almost calming. The fog of illness and hurt was completely gone now. My head was beautifully, crystallinely clear.

They had mistaken my quietness for weakness. My generosity for stupidity. My love for them as something they could exploit indefinitely without consequences.

They were about to learn exactly how wrong they were.

The shift inside me was profound. The hurt didn’t vanish—it was still there, a deep bruise that would probably never fully heal. But it stopped paralyzing me. It crystallized into something harder. More focused.

For days, I’d felt like a victim. Now I felt like a CEO.

I stopped replaying their insults in my head and started planning strategy instead. My original plan had been to fly home, stay in my childhood bedroom, pretend to be the dutiful daughter, and maintain the fiction that I was just ordinary Scarlet.

My new plan was very different.

I wasn’t going to be just Scarlet this Christmas. And I wasn’t going to let them control the narrative anymore.

I pulled up Julian’s file—not just glancing at it, but reading it with new eyes. I’d reviewed it carefully before hiring him, of course, but now I was looking for something specific.

He wasn’t old money, despite what my family desperately believed. He was the complete opposite. His personal statement told a story of fierce, grinding ambition: a working-class neighborhood in Pennsylvania; a father who was a mechanic; a mother who was a teacher’s aide; an Ivy League scholarship earned through sheer talent; a brutal climb up the corporate ladder powered by nothing but brilliance and relentless work ethic.

There was a line in his application essay that jumped out at me now, though I’d only skimmed it before: “I have no patience for unearned arrogance or for people who mistake privilege for merit.”

My sister—the aspiring influencer who had never worked a real day in her life, who lived entirely off money she didn’t earn—had somehow snagged a self-made man who despised everything she represented. Their entire plan was built on a foundation of lies. They were pretending to be the very kind of upper-class snobs that a man like Julian would, in all likelihood, find contemptible.

And they were using their supposed prominence—a prominence I had secretly purchased for them—to try to impress him.

The trap wasn’t something I needed to build. It was already there, ticking away, waiting to spring. The truth itself was the trap.

My original decision had been to just show up unannounced. Now I realized that wasn’t enough. I wasn’t just going to arrive. I was going to arrive.

I made two phone calls.

The first was to Maria, my executive assistant and the only person on earth who knew the full, contradictory details of my life. “Maria, I need you to book me a suite at the Four Seasons downtown, near my parents’ house. December twenty-fourth through the twenty-sixth.”

“The Four Seasons, Miss Vance?” Maria’s surprise was evident. “Not staying with your family?”

“No, Maria. Not with my family. And I need a car service—not a taxi or an Uber. The best you can find. A black Mercedes S-Class. It should pick me up at eleven-thirty on Christmas morning.”

“Understood, Miss Vance.” Maria knew better than to ask questions.

The second call was to David, the head of our internal legal and finance department. “David, I need you to draw up a complete accounting of the Vance Family Trust. The discretionary one. I want a full itemized list of every expenditure for the last five years—mortgage payments, cash transfers, medical bills, everything. And I need it notarized. I’ll need a hard copy by Monday morning.”

He didn’t ask why. He simply said, “Yes, Miss Vance. I’ll have it ready.”

I pulled up my flight information. I was supposed to fly in on the twenty-third, landing in the afternoon, taking a taxi to my parents’ house like I’d done every Christmas for the past decade. I canceled it. I booked a new flight—first class, arriving at eight p.m. on Christmas Eve.

A pang of something—guilt, sadness, grief for what I’d thought my family was—twisted in my chest. But I pushed it down. This was the end of an era. The end of pretending. The end of being their secret shame and their invisible benefactor.

I was done.

I looked at the stack of carefully wrapped gifts by my door. The expensive watch for my father. The rare poetry book for my mother. The top-of-the-line drone for Clare.

I carefully unwrapped the drone and put it back in its original box. I rewrapped my father’s watch and my mother’s book—they would get those, because I wasn’t cruel. Then I found an elegant gift bag and placed inside it the leather-bound folder David was preparing—the notarized accounting of every dollar I’d spent on this family for five years.

That would be my real gift to them. The truth.

A text from Clare lit up my phone: “Just confirming you’re NOT coming. Julian is so excited and I bought a new dress. It would be just like you to show up anyway and ruin everything by being all mopey and pathetic.”

I stared at the message for a long moment. Then I typed a simple reply: “I wouldn’t miss it for the world. See you Christmas Day.”

I hit send.

The “read” receipt appeared almost instantly. Three dots began dancing frantically as Clare started typing a response.

I put my phone on silent and tossed it into my bag.

The trap was set. Now I just had to let them walk into it.

The frantic calls started exactly one hour before I boarded my flight on Christmas Eve. I let every single one go to voicemail.

Voicemail one, from my mother, voice high-pitched and panicky: “Scarlet, what did you mean by that text? You can’t be serious. You absolutely cannot come here. I am forbidding you—do you hear me? Forbidding you—from coming to this house. Julian is already here. You will ruin everything.”

Voicemail two, from Clare, whispering furiously: “I swear to God, Scarlet, if you show up here tomorrow, I will call the police and have you arrested for trespassing. I’m not kidding. You are trying to sabotage me because you’re a jealous, pathetic nobody who can’t stand to see me happy. Stay away from my house.”

Voicemail three, from my father, gruff and angry: “Scarlet, I don’t know what kind of game you think you’re playing, but your mother is in tears. You have completely ruined Christmas Eve with this stunt, this threat. You’re a bitter, jealous woman, and you need to get help. Do not come here tomorrow. I mean it. We will not let you in the door.”

The words cut deep, but they also clarified everything. They hadn’t just uninvited me. They had declared war. They’d called me a liar, pathetic, bitter, jealous. The conditional love I’d thought existed—it wasn’t conditional at all. It simply didn’t exist.

I landed at eight p.m. The city was beautiful, dressed in holiday lights, the streets bustling with last-minute shoppers and families heading home for Christmas Eve dinners.

I bypassed the chaos of the taxi line and stepped into the warm, quiet interior of the black Mercedes waiting for me. The driver, a professional man in a dark suit, greeted me with a respectful nod and held the door.

I checked into my suite at the Four Seasons—spacious, elegant, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the glittering city park below. It was beautiful. And it was painfully, achingly empty.

I ordered room service and opened my laptop. I couldn’t sleep, so I worked instead. I finalized the Q1 budget proposals. I approved the press release for our Singapore expansion. I reviewed contract amendments until my eyes burned.

At ten p.m., my work phone pinged with an email. From Julian Rutherford. Subject line: “Merry Christmas.”

The message was brief: “Ms. Vance, I just wanted to wish you a very Merry Christmas. I’m settling in well at TerraGlobal, and I’m incredibly excited about the work we’re going to accomplish together in the new year. Thank you again for this opportunity. I won’t let you down. —Julian”

I stared at the message. “Settling in well.” He was, at that very moment, in my parents’ house. Probably drinking my father’s good scotch and eating my mother’s expensive hors d’oeuvres. Settling in with the family that was, at that exact same moment, leaving me furious voicemails forbidding me from entering their home.

The irony was almost beautiful.

I typed a brief, professional reply: “Merry Christmas to you as well, Julian. I look forward to a very productive year ahead. —S. Vance”

I imagined the scene playing out in my parents’ house. Clare would have gotten my text and panicked. She wouldn’t dare tell Julian the truth. She couldn’t say, “Oh, by the way, my sister who we uninvited might actually be your boss.” Because her entire relationship with him was built on the fiction that she was the impressive one, that her family was upper-class and important.

I pictured her cornered, forced to double down on her lies. She’d tell Julian I was unstable. Difficult. Jealous. That I might show up and cause a scene. She’d paint me as the crazy sister, the failed sister, the embarrassing relative.

And she’d tell my parents to be ready. They would present a united front of lies.

My phone rang again—a new number I didn’t recognize. I let it go to voicemail.

Voicemail four, Clare again, voice cracking but trying to sound strong: “I told Julian all about you. About how you’re… struggling with some things. He understands. He said it’s very sad, but that families are complicated. So don’t even bother showing up, Scarlet. He already knows you’re a mess. We’re all on the same page. Just leave us alone.”

I saved the voicemail carefully. She’d just committed professional slander against her sister—who happened to be Julian’s CEO. She’d actively tried to damage my reputation with a man who was crucial to my company’s success.

This wasn’t just a family drama anymore. This was a corporate liability. And I had documentation.

The trap wasn’t just set now. It was armed and ready to detonate.

I slept for maybe two hours. I woke at seven on Christmas morning, alone in a hotel room, sunlight streaming through the enormous windows.

I took a long, hot shower. I dried my hair carefully and pulled it back into a sleek, professional style. I put on minimal makeup—just enough to look polished. I selected a simple, elegant dark green cashmere dress from my suitcase. Expensive, but with no visible label, the kind of dress Clare would call boring. Simple diamond stud earrings. A thin gold watch.

I looked at myself in the mirror. I didn’t see a victim. I didn’t see a nobody. I saw S. Vance, CEO of TerraGlobal Strategies. I saw a woman who had built an empire from nothing. I saw someone who was done being small.

It was time to go to work.

At eleven-fifteen, my car service arrived. The driver held the door open with professional courtesy. I slid into the back seat with two beautifully wrapped gifts—the watch and the book—placed carefully beside me. In my hand, I carried the tasteful holiday gift bag containing the leather-bound folder from my legal department.

The drive to my parents’ house was surreal. I’d taken this route every Christmas of my life, but always in a rattling airport taxi or a borrowed car. Now I was gliding through the familiar streets in a black Mercedes S-Class, feeling like a general heading into battle.

As we turned onto their street, I could see the house—decorated with lights, a massive wreath on the door, everything picture-perfect. Parked in the driveway, directly behind my father’s car, was a sleek silver sports car.

Julian’s, no doubt.

My family was on high alert. I knew it from the voicemails, from the panic in their voices. They were expecting crazy, mopey Scarlet to show up in her sad clothes and make a scene. They’d probably been up all night, rehearsing their lines, building their unified front.

Clare’s last voicemail was proof: she hadn’t just lied to protect her fantasy. She had actively slandered me to my new CFO, tried to poison him against me before I ever walked through the door.

The car pulled smoothly to the curb. I sat for a moment, steadying myself, feeling my heartbeat slow to something calm and controlled.

“Would you like me to wait, ma’am?” the driver asked quietly.

“Yes, please,” I said. “I don’t believe I’ll be very long.”

I stepped out onto the sidewalk. The winter air was crisp and cold against my face. I walked up the stone path I’d walked a thousand times before, but this time everything felt different.

The door opened before I could ring the bell.

My mother stood there, wearing a new red dress I’d never seen before—expensive, designer. Her face, which had been arranged in some kind of welcoming smile for whoever she was expecting, collapsed into pure fury when she saw me.

“Scarlet,” she hissed, her voice low and venomous. “You cannot be here. I forbade you. I told you explicitly—”

“Hello, Mom,” I said calmly. “I’m just dropping off some Christmas gifts. I won’t stay long.”

“Gifts? We don’t want your—” She stopped mid-sentence. “Who is it, Margaret?” Clare’s voice trilled from somewhere inside the house. “Is that the caterer? Julian is starving and I promised him—”

Clare appeared in the hallway behind my mother, wearing a glittery gold cocktail dress that was wildly inappropriate for eleven-thirty in the morning. When she saw me standing on the doorstep, all the color drained from her heavily made-up face.

“Get out,” she said, her voice strangled. “Mom, tell her to leave. You are not welcome here, Scarlet. You were not invited.”

My father appeared behind them, his face like a thundercloud. “I told you not to come. You are embarrassing us. You are ruining Christmas. Get off my property before I call the police.”

“Embarrassing you?” I said, keeping my voice level and calm. “I’m simply standing on your doorstep. I promise I’ll only be a minute.”

“It’s just my sister,” Clare said suddenly, her voice shifting to something syrupy and performative, speaking over her shoulder to someone in the living room. “The one I told you about. The difficult one. She’s just—she’s having a bit of an episode. She gets like this sometimes. Very jealous of other people’s happiness.”

She was performing for him. For Julian.

I stepped past my mother into the foyer without waiting for permission. The house was warm, smelling of pine and roasting turkey and expensive candles. There, standing by the beautifully decorated Christmas tree with a glass of champagne in his hand, wearing a tailored blazer and looking every inch the high-powered executive, was Julian Rutherford.

He looked up with a polite, slightly strained smile—the expression of someone who’s been told their girlfriend’s family is dysfunctional and is trying to be diplomatic about it. He was ready to be introduced to Clare’s nobody sister, to make small talk for sixty seconds before she left.

Our eyes met.

I watched, in real time, as his entire world came crashing down.

Julian’s polite smile didn’t fade slowly. It evaporated. The champagne glass stopped halfway to his mouth, frozen in mid-air. The blood drained from his face so quickly I thought he might actually faint. His eyes went wide—confusion, then recognition, then dawning, absolute horror.

He stood completely still, like a statue, staring at me as if I were a ghost.

My family didn’t notice. They were too focused on their intruder, on getting me out the door before I could ruin their perfect Christmas.

“Scarlet, I am not going to tell you again,” my father boomed, taking a step toward me, his hand raised as if to physically remove me.

“Boss.”

Julian’s voice was barely above a whisper, but in the tension-filled silence of that hallway, it sounded like a gunshot.

My father stopped mid-step. Clare and my mother froze. They all turned slowly to look at Julian, confusion written across their faces.

He was still staring at me, his champagne glass trembling in his hand.

“Boss,” he said again, louder this time, his voice cracking with confusion and panic. “Miss Vance, what—what are you doing here?”

The silence that followed was absolute. I could hear an ornament settling on the tree with a faint crystal ting. I could hear someone’s breathing—fast and shallow.

My mother, my father, my sister—they swiveled their heads back to me in perfect synchronization, their expressions identical masks of slack-jawed incomprehension.

Clare broke the spell with a high, hysterical laugh. “What? Julian, what did you just call her? Don’t be ridiculous. This is just Scarlet. My sister. The one I told you about.”

Julian ignored her completely. He straightened, all of his professional deference and barely controlled panic flooding into his body language. He looked from me to Clare and back again, his face flushing from pale white to deep, mortified red.

“Ms. Vance, I had no idea—I mean, Clare said her sister was—she said you were—” He stumbled over his words, unable to complete a sentence.

“She said I was struggling,” I offered quietly, my voice calm and carrying easily through the dead silence. “That I was a mess. That I was a nobody with a sad little office job.”

Julian’s face went from red to crimson. “She—yes, Miss Vance, I—”

“Clare?” My mother’s voice was thin and reedy, her hand clutching my sister’s arm. “What is he talking about? Why is he calling her boss?”

“He’s wrong!” Clare shrieked, her carefully constructed composure shattering into pieces. “He’s confused! Tell them, Scarlet. Tell them you’re lying. Tell them you’re just a secretary or an assistant or something.”