“I’m with the police,” I said calmly. “Lucas has just been arrested for grand theft auto and driving with a suspended license. The car is being impounded.”
There was a silence on the other end, so profound it felt like the line had been cut. Then a sound I had never heard from my father: pure, unadulterated panic mixed with fury.
“You—you did what?” he whispered. “You arrested your brother, your pregnant brother.”
“I reported my car stolen,” I corrected him. “You and Lucas did the rest.”
“Fix this!” he screamed, his voice shredding. “Tell them it was a mistake. Tell them I gave him permission. If you don’t fix this right now, Elina, so help me God, you are no daughter of mine. I will disown you. I will throw you out of the family.”
I looked at Officer Martinez. He was watching me, waiting to see if I would fold. This was the dynamic my father relied on—the threat of exile, the fear of being an orphan.
“You can’t disown me, Dad,” I said, my voice icy and clear, “because I’m the only one with any assets left to own. And as for the car, it’s going to the police impound. If you want to bail Lucas out, I suggest you sell your boat, because I’m not paying for it.”
I hung up.
“Officer,” I said, turning to Martinez, “can I please retrieve my spare key from his pocket before you take him away?”
The adrenaline crash that followed the arrest was brutal. I didn’t get my car back that night. Because it was evidence in a felony theft and because the driver was unlicensed, it had to be towed to the impound lot. I had to pay an Uber to take me home to my empty driveway.
The silence in my house was different now. It wasn’t the silence of peace. It was the silence of a fortress under siege. My phone became a weapon I was afraid to touch. It buzzed incessantly. Seventeen missed calls from Mom. Twelve from Dad. Texts from numbers I didn’t save but recognized as aunts and cousins. How could you do this to your family? He has a baby coming. Your father is in the hospital with chest pains because of you. Selfish.
The chest pains were a classic Gary Rossi move. He used his health like a hostage whenever he lost control of a situation. I knew logically that it was a manipulation tactic, but the guilt was a physical weight, heavy and suffocating.
I needed to fortify my position. I couldn’t just rely on the police report. I knew my family. They would lie to the DA. They would claim I gave verbal permission. They would say I was unstable, jealous, vindictive. I sat down at my computer and opened a new browser window. I needed to know the full extent of what I was dealing with.
I started with the court records. They were public domain, but I had never looked. I had always taken my parents’ word for it that Lucas’s legal troubles were minor misunderstandings or bad luck. I typed in Lucas Rossi. The search results populated instantly. It wasn’t just one DUI three years ago. There was a possession of controlled substance charge from two years ago—dismissed. Likely because Dad paid for a lawyer I didn’t know about. There were three speeding tickets in the last six months. Wait, three speeding tickets in the last six months? Lucas had no license. How was he getting tickets?
I clicked on the docket details. The vehicle listed on the tickets wasn’t my car. It was a 2018 sedan registered to Brenda Rossi—my mother. My blood ran cold. My mother, who claimed to be a neutral peacekeeper, had been letting him drive her car for months. They all knew. They knew he was driving illegally. They knew he was a danger to everyone on the road, and they had enabled it.
But then I saw something that made my heart stop. A civil judgment filed four weeks ago. State Farm Insurance versus Lucas Rossi. It was a subrogation claim. Lucas had been in an accident—an at-fault accident. The details were sparse, but the amount was staggering. $12,000.
I pieced it together. Lucas had crashed Mom’s car. That’s why he didn’t have a car. That’s why Dad was so desperate to get him wheels. Mom’s car wasn’t broken. It was likely totaled or hidden to avoid insurance fraud investigations if he was driving it while excluded from the policy. They weren’t just borrowing my car. They were using my clean record and my insured vehicle to plug the hole Lucas had blown in their lives. If he had crashed my car, my insurance would have skyrocketed—or worse, denied the claim because of his suspended license—leaving me on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars. They were willing to bankrupt me to keep him mobile.
I printed every page. My printer rhythmically spat out the evidence of their negligence.
Then my phone rang again. It was a number I didn’t recognize—a local landline. I picked up, thinking it might be the impound lot.
“Hello, Elina.”
