Chapter 4 - The Sound of Glass Shattering
The silence that followed was absolute, heavy, and suffocating.
You could have heard a pin drop on the hardwood floor.
Daphne sat frozen, her mouth slightly open, staring at me as if I were a ghost who had just risen from the dead. The golden aura she had cultivated all evening had completely shattered, leaving behind the frantic, cornered expression of a fraud caught in broad daylight.
"That... that is an outrageous lie!" Daphne shrieked, her voice pitching an octave higher as panic clawed through her composure. She looked wildly around the table, desperate for validation. "She’s making this up! She’s jealous because I'm successful and she’s just a bitter, insecure housewife!"
"Am I?" I asked quietly.
I picked up my phone, unlocked the screen with a quick thumb scan, and slid the device across the polished mahogany table. It glided smoothly past Lorraine’s untouched wine glass, past Sloan’s gaping mouth, and stopped right beside Daphne’s plate.
Right there on the screen was the official termination letter from Aura Global’s human resources department, bearing an electronic signature, a corporate compliance stamp, and a detailed ledger of the financial discrepancies tied directly to Daphne’s employee ID.
Daphne didn't touch the phone. She looked down at it as if it were a venomous snake coil ready to strike.
Lorraine slowly turned her head, her pearl necklace shifting as she stared at Daphne with horror and disbelief. "Daphne... is this true? You were fired?"
"No! No, of course not! This is a fake! She hacked something together!" Daphne yelled, standing up so fast her chair screeched loudly against the hardwood floor. She grabbed her designer handbag from the back of her seat, her hands shaking violently. "I don't have to sit here and listen to this psychotic garbage! Sloan, your sister is completely deranged!"
Sloan sat paralyzed, staring back and forth between Daphne and me, utterly incapable of processing the sudden, catastrophic collapse of her new best friend.
Then, all eyes slowly turned toward the head of the table.
Beckett.
He was staring at the phone screen, his face drained of all color, his eyes wide with a sudden, dawning terror. He wasn't just looking at Daphne's termination letter; he was realizing what this meant for him, for his social standing, and for the fragile, pathetic little ego he had been stroking all evening at my expense.
"Beckett," Daphne hissed, her voice cracking as she rushed around the table, placing her hand frantically on his shoulder. "Tell her. Tell her this is insane. Tell her you know who I am."
Beckett slowly raised his head. He looked at Daphne—the same woman he had been gazing at with starry-eyed admiration just twenty minutes ago—and for the first time all night, he saw her clearly. Not as a glamorous, high-powered executive, but as a liability. A fraud. A public embarrassment.
Slowly, deliberately, Beckett reached up and shrugged her hand off his shoulder.
"Daphne," Beckett muttered, his voice hollow and trembling. "I think... I think you should leave."
Daphne’s jaw dropped. The betrayal in her eyes was absolute. "You coward," she whispered, her voice shaking with pure venom. "You were hanging onto every word I said! You loved every minute of it!"
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"Leave. Now," Beckett said louder, his face flushing crimson with humiliation as he realized his parents and sister were watching his utter spinelessness unfold in real-time.
Without another word, Daphne turned on her heel and bolted toward the foyer. The front door swung open with a loud bang, and a second later, the heavy oak door slammed shut behind her, echoing through the quiet Buckhead night like a gunshot.
