My brother, a police officer, arrested me during Sunday dinner, right in front of our family. “You’re under arrest for impersonating a military officer and theft of government property,” my own brother snarled as he slammed my face onto the cold marble floor of our grandmother’s dining room, his knee digging into my back. As he snapped the handcuffs onto my wrists, the door suddenly burst open. A four-star general and his men marched in. “Lieutenant!” he roared. “Step away from the general right now.”

Mark leaned back, his expression sharpening. “Or maybe it’s easier to pretend to have a job when no one can verify anything. No colleagues, no supervisors. Just Jordan and her endless classified excuses.”

My stomach clenched. Not out of guilt, but because I knew this was no longer dinner. This was the opening statement of a case he’d been building. And every guest at that table—they were his jury.

He stood up. The chair slid back with the scrape of finality. Mark rose from his seat like a prosecutor stepping into closing arguments.

“I’ve spent the last four months looking into her,” he said, pulling a manila folder from beneath his blazer like a magician revealing the final trick. “Photos. Surveillance. Witness accounts.”

He laid it on the table, opened the flap, and began passing pictures down the line. Grainy shots of me entering secure buildings, leaving nondescript vehicles, picking up my dry cleaning with military dress blues visible under the plastic.

My mother looked at them with a slow-blinking frown. My father stared straight ahead at the centerpiece. Noah’s fork froze mid-air.

“Mark,” Grandma Margaret’s voice was thin but sharp. “What is this?”

“Evidence, Grandma,” he said smoothly. “Of fraud. Of stolen valor. Of a fabricated life built to deceive this entire family.”

He turned to me, his eyes gleaming with righteous indignation. “You wear medals you didn’t earn. You lie about where you go. And you think we’re all too stupid or sentimental to call you on it. But I’m not. Not anymore.”

He pulled his badge from his pocket and laid it next to the folder.

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