The sentence still has a taste—tin and citrus on the tongue—whenever I let the house go quiet enough to hear it. Two years have passed since my brother, Marcus, said it across our parents’ Phoenix table, and yet that Easter returns with the hard clarity of a photograph: lacquered cherry wood shining like a lake, my mother’s blue‑and‑white porcelain set out the way she does when she wants a day to matter, Diane laughing into a green bottle of plum wine, and Marcus slouching like a prince on a borrowed throne. “We’re adults now,” he added, not at me but past me, as if I were a reflection and he preferred the window.
Six months later, black SUVs coiled onto his Scottsdale street before sunrise, and the words he’d tossed like a napkin came back pressed and starched. Doors opened. Neighbors watched.
The FBI did what the FBI does. And my family, who had refused my legal advice, suddenly needed my lawyer. My name is Rebecca Chen.
I became a federal prosecutor the old‑fashioned way—show up, stay late, tell the truth even when it empties a room. I was raised to believe that if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing with both hands and all your sleep. My parents, Robert and Linda Chen, came to Denver from Taiwan with a suitcase each and a collection of unteachable habits: thrift that wasn’t stingy, pride that wasn’t loud, and a faith in education that turned dishwater into tuition.
They opened a restaurant that smelled of star anise, sautéed ginger, and a clean sting of bleach, and taught us that dignity isn’t a refill; it is what you carry to the table. There were three of us. I was the eldest, the one with the spare Band‑Aid and the refrigerator calendar.
Marcus was two years behind me, handsome, charming, and fluent in the language of shortcuts. He married Jennifer, his college sweetheart, and moved to Phoenix to build—what, precisely, kept changing—developments, opportunities, relationships. The twins, Nathan and Tyler, arrived like a pair of exclamation points, and my parents retired to Arizona to be near them.
Diane, our youngest, a graphic designer with black jeans and ink on her fingers, moved to Portland and refused to apologize for joy. For years we worked. Our family rotated holidays and forgave distance and assumed love could cross state lines without losing its salt.
We argued about harmless things: how spicy Dad’s clams should be, whether Diane’s new client’s logo looked like a cartoon acorn. But even solid houses hide hairline fractures under paint. If you spend a career reading indictments, you learn to see where a life will crack before it does.
The first sign came one Phoenix Thanksgiving. Marcus spoke about “projects” the way people talk weather: vaguely, with a shrug toward forces beyond control. Jennifer kept checking her phone with the alert, haunted poise of someone listening for a wave to change its mind.
In his office I saw renderings that didn’t match permits, gaps in timetables wide enough to drive a leased German car through, and a donor list with three names I knew from case files rather than holiday cards. “Everything okay?” I asked, gently, because I wanted to be a sister, not a scalpel. He bristled.
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