My name is Prudence Paul, and I spent the last hour of my childhood locked inside my own bedroom, a velvet armchair wedged under the door handle, watching a clock in the corner of my laptop screen count down toward midnight.
Outside my window the coastal fog had rolled in off the Pacific the way it always did that time of year, swallowing the cliffs and the palm trees and the glass mansions of the Palisades one by one, until our own house looked suspended in its own private weather system. From the street it looked like success had found a permanent address. Glass walls, imported marble, an infinity pool that mirrored the sky, a garage full of cars that seemed more financially stable than anyone who drove them. Inside, if you knew where to look, it was a museum of debt wearing very good lighting.
At twelve oh one in the morning, on the day I turned eighteen, I opened a secure portal, verified my identity, and moved every dollar of my inheritance into an irrevocable trust before anyone in that house had the chance to touch it.
Forty five million dollars. My father’s money. My last clean exit, taken while everyone I lived with was still asleep, still confident that morning would arrive on their schedule instead of mine.
I want to say I did it out of some cold, calculating instinct I’d been born with, but the truth is simpler and a little more embarrassing. Two weeks earlier I still believed I had time. Not that I trusted my mother, exactly. Trust had left our house years before, around the time my biological father died and Veronica discovered that grief photographed beautifully in a black dress, provided the life insurance paperwork was already moving. But some small, stubborn part of me still believed my eighteenth birthday might be allowed to belong to me. A quiet dinner at the Italian place in Brentwood where my father used to take me when I was seven, where he let me order tiramisu before the entree because, he said, life was too short for dessert to stand in line.
