That part hit weird. I was the cold one. Not the one who trashed a wedding cake and screamed in front of a crowd. Not the one who’d been living off me for the past 3 years, but the one who finally said enough. That’s who they were mad at. I hung up without agreeing to anything. That night, Emily and I made dinner and didn’t even bring it up until we were halfway through eating. She said we shouldn’t go. I agreed.
Then Friday night, the day before the party, something even more ridiculous happened. Bethany sent me a Venmo request for $1,800. Label: “for the cake and broken frame. Lol. Let’s just call it even.” I didn’t even react at first. I just handed my phone to Emily and walked out to the balcony.
When I came back in, she had the calmest look on her face. I asked her what she wrote. She shrugged and said, “She’s not going to like it.” Fifteen minutes later, Bethany blocked both of us on everything.
We didn’t go to my dad’s birthday party, but Bethany did, and she didn’t come quietly. She showed up in a white jumpsuit that looked suspiciously close to bridal wear. Cousin Cara texted us a photo with a caption: “She’s not okay.”
Apparently, she brought some real estate guy she met two weeks prior and told half the guests they were moving in together soon. The other half she told, “Big things are coming.” She kept saying it over and over: “Big things.”
That Monday we found out what the big thing was. Bethany launched a podcast. The title:
“Bloodline Bruises: Growing Up with the Golden Child.”
The teaser trailer dropped on Instagram and TikTok. In the voiceover, she said things like, “I thought family meant safety,” and “Sometimes the most challenging people are the ones you share a last name with.”
It was so theatrical it felt scripted. But she wasn’t done. At the end of the video, she thanked a sponsor, a therapy app—the exact one I’d introduced her to a year earlier when she called me from the bathroom of a bar, crying about a panic attack. She’d signed a real deal. They reposted her video. She got over 10,000 views in 24 hours.
People in the comments were eating it up, calling her brave, asking for advice, telling her they related. I didn’t care about the podcast itself, but something about it made me feel unsettled, like I was being slowly written into someone else’s fiction.