Chapter 3 - The Brass Plate
“Come in,” I said, my voice carrying the steady, uninflected tone I usually reserved for struggling contractors.
My corner office was expansive, filled with minimalist Scandinavian furniture, whiteboards covered in complex robotic algorithms, and a sweeping panoramic view of the Portland skyline. The sheer scale of the space seemed to make visitors instinctively careful about where they placed their feet.
Briana recovered her equilibrium first. She plastered on a bright, rehearsed smile, stepped past me into the room without waiting for an invitation, and chose a sleek leather armchair facing my desk. She laid her glossy presentation folder squarely in the center of the wood. Colton remained hovering near the doorway until Briana shot him a sharp, impatient look. Then he shuffled forward and sat down beside her, keeping his hands tightly interlaced between his knees.
Briana began with the practiced cadence of a self-help seminar speaker. She and Colton were currently developing an upscale lifestyle and wellness brand, she explained, leaning forward. They had a concept, an audience acquisition strategy, and a massive opportunity to scale rapidly—if only they could secure the right strategic investor to bridge the gap before their upcoming product launch.
She opened the folder to reveal a page filled with stock photographs, ambitious marketing jargon, vague growth projections, and absolutely zero concrete math on how the business would actually generate revenue.
They needed two million dollars in seed funding.
Briana said the figure aloud as calmly as someone asking a waiter to pass the salt at a diner. When I looked away from her and glanced at Colton, my brother was studying the dark wood grain of my desk, his jaw working nervously. The boy who had once wept on my doorstep because he had nowhere to sleep had come to my executive office to ask for an astronomical sum of money I had never discussed with him, yet he couldn't even bring himself to look me in the eye while doing it.
“Why me?” I asked quietly, resting my elbows on the armrests of my chair.
Briana gestured lightly with one manicured hand toward the brass nameplate mounted outside my door. “Well, Vanessa, clearly you’re in a unique financial position to understand a high-yield opportunity when you see one.”
I thought of the cruel text message still sitting in the archive of my phone, sent less than a week ago.
“Just a few days ago,” I said, my voice dropping into an icy register, “you told me I killed the vibe at your barbecue and instructed me not to come. Today, you walked into my office asking me to hand over two million dollars. What changed?”
Her practiced smile tightened into a rigid grimace. “Oh, come on, Vanessa. That was just a joke! Families joke around like that all the time. You shouldn't take things so personally.”
Colton finally looked up, his eyes darting anxiously around my office. I waited for him to say something about the text message, or our mother’s laughing emoji, or even the Larkspur Lane house he had been living in rent-free for thirty-six months.
He said absolutely nothing.
May you like
Briana pushed the glossy folder a little closer across my desk, as though the small physical gap between us was the only remaining obstacle left to solve.
I reached out, slid the folder back across the mahogany surface toward her, and picked up the sleek desk phone.
