Chapter 6: What Chloe Bought
The next morning, the ledger looked smaller in daylight.
It sat between Aunt Ruth’s sugar bowl and a stack of old mail, its cloth cover worn thin at the corners. Julian had spread out the photographs we’d taken, careful not to move the original pages. I leaned over the images until the columns blurred.
“Here,” he said.
A line near the bottom of one page showed a date, a shortened business name, and an amount. Beside it, in a different hand, someone had written a string of numbers.
“Cove Travel,” I read. “Is that what it says?”
Ruth put on her glasses. “That’s what your father called it. I don’t know if that’s the full name.”
Julian searched the number on his phone. A travel agency in Santa Rosa came up, with a pale blue logo and a photograph of a beach so bright it looked almost false.
My stomach tightened before he even turned the screen toward me.
I called.
The woman who answered sounded brisk and cheerful until I gave her the reference number. Then came a pause, the click of a keyboard.
“I can’t discuss a customer’s booking without their permission,” she said.
“I understand. I’m not asking you to tell me anything private. I’m trying to identify a payment listed in my account records.”
Another pause.
“An amount matching what you described was applied to a group booking,” she said carefully. “The traveler’s name is Chloe.”
I stared at the ledger. “My sister.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s all I can confirm without authorization.”
When I hung up, the room seemed to contract around the little blue travel logo on Julian’s screen.
Ruth lowered her eyes. “I should have noticed.”
“You signed what Dad put in front of you,” I said.
The words came out before I could decide whether they were comfort or accusation. Ruth looked up, and I saw how badly she wanted them to be comfort.
I wasn’t ready to give her that. Not yet.
I texted Chloe: I found a payment connected to your trip. Come talk to me. Bring whatever you have.
Her reply came less than a minute later.
I’m at the airport. I’m coming home.
By the time she arrived that evening, a fine rain had started tapping Ruth’s windows. Chloe came in with a carry-on and a damp strand of hair stuck to her cheek. She looked tired enough to fold in half, but she set a thick envelope on the table between us.
“I changed my flight,” she said. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
The words didn’t erase the Bali photographs I’d seen online—the blue water, the villa, my sister smiling beneath a palm tree while two empty chairs waited at my wedding. But they shifted something in me. The anger stayed. It just had to make room for a question.
“What did Dad tell you?” I asked.
Chloe’s eyes moved from me to the ledger. “That Grandma left money, but it was being handled for the family. He said you knew. That you’d agreed to help while the business was in trouble.”
“Did you believe him?”
She pressed her lips together. “I believed my parents.”
“That isn’t the same answer.”
“I know.” Her voice cracked on the last word. She pulled out a chair but didn’t sit. “I’m not saying I checked. I’m saying Dad told me you’d said yes.”
Julian stayed quiet beside me. The restraint felt like a hand at my back—not pushing, not pulling.
Chloe opened the envelope. Inside were printed itineraries, payment receipts, and a glossy brochure for the hotel. She laid each item out as if arranging proof of a life she’d thought she understood.
“Here’s the booking,” she said. “Here’s what I paid myself. And here—this was the deposit.”
The figure matched the ledger entry.
I looked at the receipt, then at my sister. “You paid some of it.”
“Yes. Dad said he’d cover the deposit because I’d already spent money on the flights.” Chloe’s fingers worried the edge of the paper. “He called it a gift. He said you wanted me to go.”
The sentence landed harder than the amount. I could hear Dad’s confident voice behind it, smoothing the story until it sounded like mine.
“You never asked me?”
“No.” She looked ashamed, but not surprised by her own answer. “I thought he’d already talked to you.”
“You knew he’d demanded I move my wedding.”
“I knew you two were fighting about the dates.” Her chin lifted, defensive now. “I didn’t know he’d—” She stopped. “I thought you’d work it out.”
A soft, ugly laugh escaped me. “He solved it by making sure I had to walk toward two empty chairs.”
Chloe flinched. For a moment, the only sound was the rain and the small, steady tick of Ruth’s kitchen clock.
Then Chloe picked up another slip from the envelope. Her face changed as she read it.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It was tucked into the receipt folder Mom gave me.” She slid it across the table.
A note was written in Mom’s familiar slanted hand: Keep the trip booked until papers are signed.
My gaze snagged on the last two words.
“What papers?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Chloe sounded too quick, then slower. “Mom said there’d be some family paperwork. She told me not to cancel anything until it was handled.”
“Did you ask what it was?”
“She said Dad was taking care of it.”
The answer left a bitter taste in my mouth. Mom’s handwriting made the note feel more intimate than the bank record. Not an entry in a book, not a figure copied from one account to another. A message meant to be read by someone in my family, folded into a trip that had taken money from an account I never knew existed.
Chloe picked up the receipt again. Her thumb stopped beside a short handwritten note at the bottom.
“Wait,” she whispered.
“What?”
She leaned closer. “This is Dad’s handwriting.”
I looked at the dark ink. A few ordinary words beside the payment reference. Nothing that could explain the whole scheme. Nothing that could tell me what Mom meant by papers.
May you like
Chloe went pale.
“I saw him sign your name once,” she said.
