“You’re just a secretary,” my aunt mocked—until her SEAL son froze, leaned closer, and whispered, “Oracle 9?”

I stood there for a moment in the marble floored entryway. A ghost in the house I grew up in. That evening the performance continued. The house filled with a low murmur of power. the sound of my mother’s inner circle. They were a curated collection of Washington DC’s elite, politicians, lobbyists, and business titans, all sipping my mother’s expensive wine and trading influence.

I tried to make conversation to find some neutral territory, but I felt like an anthropologist studying a strange alien tribe. That’s when Eleanor approached me. Her smile fixed and brilliant, a politician’s weapon. She pressed something crisp and white into my hand. An apron. “Haley, darling,” she said, her voice a sweet, poisonous melody. “You’re not familiar with most of the people here I know.

How about you help the staff with the ordurves? You’re used to serving after all, aren’t you?” The words hung in the air. a public indictment. A few of the nearby guests offered stifled, polite chuckles. I glanced over at Liam. He stood talking to a senator, and upon hearing our mother’s words, he simply shrugged, a small, dismissive gesture, before turning back to his conversation about his latest architectural project.

He was an accomplice in his indifference. A hot flush of shame crept up my neck, burning my face. In that moment, I wasn’t a major general in the United States Army. The two stars on my shoulders earned through sweat, blood, and sleepless nights felt like they had been stripped away. I was just a helper, a prop, an inconvenience in a pristine white apron.

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