Chapter 6

Second sister broke down right after.

She started heaving with dry retches, tears mixing with the involuntary ones: "He used to dodge and cry when I splashed hot water on him. But that day, not even an eyelash moved—I thought he was just being stubborn... Was he already beyond feeling by then?"

From inside the car, third sister buried her head in her knees, her shoulders shaking violently as she let out a muffled wail.

Eldest sister was the last to break. She didn't cry. She walked to my room, past the yellow tape the officers had finished with, and sat on my bed.

She picked up the only personal item in the room: the faded photograph I'd clutched on adoption day. My birth parents, smiling, holding baby me and baby Kyle—before the hospital switch, before everything went wrong.

"I dragged him back to bed that night," she whispered. "He was already cold. And I told him... I told him the medical bills would come from his allowance."

She pressed the photo against her chest and sat there until the paramedics had to physically guide her out.

The investigation took three days.

Cause of death: untreated pneumonia complicated by sustained high fever and physical trauma. The coroner noted the broken finger, the burn marks, evidence of chronic malnutrition.

"This child weighed thirty-two kilograms," the coroner said at the preliminary hearing. "The average for a thirteen-year-old boy is fifty. He was essentially starving in a household with a full-time chef."

The Thornes' lawyer tried to frame it as an accident. A tragic oversight. Parents who loved too many children and stretched too thin.

The prosecutor held up the wheel.

"This isn't an oversight," she said. "This is a system. Designed, maintained, and enforced by every adult in that household. The magnetic bracelet. The rigged spins. Three years of documented deprivation disguised as 'fair play.'"

She placed a photo on the screen: my room versus Alex's. Side by side. The contrast was devastating.

"The Thornes didn't fail to notice their son was dying. They noticed. They checked. And they decided he was faking."

In the gallery, Mrs. Hale gripped her husband's hand. Marcus sat stone-faced.

The story hit the news that evening. "Heir Roulette: The Thorne Family's Deadly Game of Chance." Overnight, the Thornes went from socialites to pariahs.

Their company stock plummeted. Business partners withdrew. The country club revoked their membership. Even the private school Alex attended released a statement distancing itself.

Alex was placed with child services. He cried and asked for Mom.

Mom was in custody.

Dad posted bail but couldn't go home. The house was evidence. He sat in a hotel room, holding the five-dollar keychain he'd brought as my New Year's gift.

The Lego set—the one the rigged wheel awarded to Alex—sat unopened in the evidence locker.

And me?

I hovered above it all, lighter than air, watching everything I'd once desperately wanted crumble into dust.

Grandma Lily used to say: "Zach, good people don't always get good luck. But bad luck doesn't mean you're bad."

I used to believe that, in the countryside, catching fireflies in summer, sleeping under quilts she'd stitched by hand.

Then I came home to the Thornes, and I forgot.

Three years of black spins made me forget.

But floating here now, untethered from the pain, from the hunger, from the cold—I finally remembered.

I wasn't unlucky.

I was just in the wrong house.

On the last night before the trial, I drifted to my room one final time. The yellow tape was gone. The bed had been stripped. Only the wheel remained on the nightstand, left behind by the evidence team after being photographed.

I looked at it.

Red and black. Fifty-fifty. Except it never was.

A gust of wind I couldn't feel swept through the open window.

The pointer spun. Slowly, lazily, with no magnet to guide it.

It landed on red.

I stared at it for a long, long time.

Then I smiled.

"Grandma. I'm coming home."

The last thing I saw, as the room faded and the light above grew warm and golden, was that tiny red arrow—pointing, for the first and final time, in my direction.