Burned the Favorites

I was the broken daughter of a New England dynasty. The kind of family the *Globe* writes obituaries for in advance.

Mother dead since I was six. Father in Singapore, sending instructions by encrypted email. Three older brothers who treated our ward, Perry, like the last surviving piece of our mother and treated me like a clerical error they couldn't get HR to fix.

The app on my wrist — Atlas, the family had it force-installed after my sophomore-year *incident* — told me, in Notion-productivity-bot register, what was expected.

Drug her. Cut her. Push her in the water.

Endpoint: my fiancé dissolves the engagement, the brothers throw me out, and I die in a black Suburban during a March nor'easter at the back service gate of the Greenwich estate.

Bennett handed me the vial in the gala's side hallway, voice cold enough to fog the marble.

"In Perry's prosecco. The Veuve, not the house pour. By nine."

I nodded. Then I poured it into his bourbon.

Forty minutes later I had him locked in the second-floor library with Perry, the *Town & Country* photographer was three flights down, and Atlas was screaming through my AirPods that I had gone off-script.

I ate a petit four off a passing tray.

"I didn't go off-script," I told it. "I just got them to fall in love faster."