Page 118 of Devious Lies (Cruel Crown)
Didn’t matter either way.
The threats didn’t get to me. Not until Hank died, and I had felt the real-world impact of Dad’s theft and the accusations finally held merit. Angus Bedford’s death came next, and that brought more nasty comments.
I accepted them all as my new normal, occasionally logging on to Insta and searching for pretty words to pass time. But this message took me by surprise. Not because I felt lonely but because her words felt lonelier.
Die. Just die.
The sender hadn’t bothered to put her feed on private or create a fake new profile like some of the others. It was so simple a threat on a rare moment the Winthrop family had left the news cycle, so it made me curious.
Demi Wilson.
18.
Dog lover.
Car lover.
People hater.
A kindred spirit.
I browsed her feed, learned her life, and found one picture I couldn’t forget.
She had her arm around Angus Bedford’s shoulders. They stood in front of a classic car with tools sprawled all over the floor. Rain plastered their hair to their foreheads, but it didn’t faze their goofy smiles.
The caption: I miss my dad something fierce on rainy days. #RIP
The next day, she apologized, told me she’d been drunk, and said she didn’t blame me for my dad’s mistakes. I messaged back a cheesy meme of two stick figure eggs hugging that read, “Apology Egg-ccepted.”
What I really wanted to say was—Forgiving others is a myth. The only prisoner freed when you forgive someone is you.
It didn’t matter if the Winthrop haters ever forgave me, because I would never forgive my family and the way I’d lived a life of privilege, oblivious to the sins that funded it.
I never talked to Demi again, but I checked on her like you would a wild animal in your backyard.
From afar.
Never speaking a word.
Just watching.
Waiting.
Wondering.
Months later, Demi posted her acceptance to Wilton University on her Insta feed. Two weeks later, she added to her Snap story when she received a full-ride scholarship from Wilton, then again when she got a C in Art History and it was rescinded.
I signed her change.org petition, which begged Wilton to change its mind. She had thirty-six signatures excluding my own, none of which did a thing. What she really needed was a wealthy father like mine, or at the very least, Angus Bedford, who had invested a decent chunk in Winthrop Textiles’s college fund before his death.
Each dollar put in would be matched by the company for use on college tuitions of employees and their families. When the company fell, so did the college fund.
My freshman year of college, I barely left my apartment, pigging out on packets of ramen I bought four for a buck at the dollar store down the block. My books landed on the iPhone Dad gifted me ages ago from my library scans. I paid my tuition and a small stipend with the crazy amounts of student loans I had taken out.
Virginia held my trust fund over my head, which meant I was broke, spending more money than I had each year, and taking out student loans to sustain the costs. Broke as I was, I couldn’t let Demi skip college.
I asked Dad’s old fixer to set up the anonymous scholarship fund and applied for a full-time job at the diner.
The double shifts gave me feet and back pain, but they didn’t kill me.
