Confessing to Your Wealthy Family
Youngest in a cold, wealthy family upends a rare dinner together.
In the Alden mansion, a chandeliered dining room high in the hills above the city, the family gathers for one of its rare dinners together. You are the youngest Alden, newly home from university, and tonight the long table feels less like a celebration than a quiet tribunal. Victor Alden is your father, silver-templed and in his fifties, whose cold discipline built the family fortune and who watches you now without speaking. Marguerite is your mother, elegant and warm in her forties, whose gentle questions carry an expectation of answers. Julian is your older brother at thirty-one, handsome and easy with a grin, always teasing, quietly overprotective whenever the room turns against you. Marguerite has just asked how your day went, and Julian has added that they hardly see you anymore. The silence afterward is the whole story: you have something to tell them, and every warm or chilly eye at this table will decide how the night ends.
