Six months later.
The crisp autumn breeze swept through Millennium Park in Chicago. The leaves were a brilliant mosaic of gold and crimson.
Leo was running across the great lawn, chasing a golden retriever puppy we had adopted a month prior. He was laughing, a bright, joyous sound that echoed off the skyscrapers. There was no trace of the fragile, dying boy from the island clinic, only a vibrant, energetic second-grader.
I sat on a park bench, sipping a hot latte, flanked by two of my closest friends from the architectural firm. They were the people who had met us at the airport when Leo and I finally flew home, bringing balloons, homemade casseroles, and shoulder to cry on. They were my actual family.
Through the inevitable, highly active grapevine of extended relatives, I had received the updates regarding Beatrice and Daphne’s European exile.
It had been a brutal, humiliating ordeal for them. Stranded in Amalfi without a cent to their names, they had been forced to sleep in the lobby of a train station for two nights before begging the local police to direct them to the American Consulate in Naples.
The consulate had been unsympathetic to their complaints of “stolen luxury.” They were forced to sign legally binding promissory notes to the U.S. government for emergency repatriation loans—the bare minimum required to purchase two miserable, middle-seat economy tickets on a budget airline back to Chicago.
When they finally arrived, exhausted and humiliated, reality hit them like a freight train.
I had been ruthless. I had legally evicted Daphne from her luxury loft, her name nowhere on the lease I had held. Beatrice returned to find the locks changed on the condo I owned, a ‘For Sale’ sign staked proudly in the front yard. Their leased luxury cars had been voluntarily surrendered to the dealerships.
In a desperate, flailing attempt to reclaim their stolen luxury, they had hired a cheap lawyer and tried to sue me for “financial abandonment” and “breach of verbal contract.”
A county judge had thrown the case out with a harsh laugh in under ten minutes, reminding them that a thirty-five-year-old adult woman has absolutely no legal obligation to fund the lifestyles of her able-bodied mother and sister, especially after they committed wire fraud against a joint account.
The last I heard, the former socialites were sharing a cramped, un-airconditioned studio apartment near the airport. Daphne was working as a cashier at a discount clothing store, while Beatrice was taking shifts at a local bakery just to pay off their massive debt to the federal government.
I took a sip of my coffee and watched Leo throw a tennis ball for the puppy.
