At our extravagant engagement party, I watched from the balcony as my fiancée deliberately pushed my mother into the decorative fountain. “Your cheap clothes are ruining my aesthetic,” she laughed with her wealthy friends. I did not shout. I calmly took out my phone and liquidated the $10 million trust fund I had just created for her. She thought she had secured a refined, old-money billionaire. She did not know my empire was born in the slums, and I knew exactly how to take away everything someone cherished.
The splash rose above the orchestra, but my fiancée’s laughter sliced through the ballroom like glass. From the balcony, I watched my mother come up in the marble fountain while two hundred guests pretended not to look.
Celeste Monroe stood at the edge in a silver gown worth more than the house I grew up in. “Your cheap clothes are ruining my aesthetic,” she said, loud enough for her friends to hear. They laughed behind jeweled hands.
My mother, Elena, gripped the fountain’s rim. Her blue dress was drenched, her gray hair stuck to her face. It was the same dress she had worn to my first business award, altered three times because she refused to let me buy her a new one.
I started down the stairs.
