My best friend of four decades threatened to ruin my daughter’s championship tournament unless I helped her bully a man whose mother just had a stroke.
For years, I had been her personal crisis manager, the emotional janitor for her self-made messes. Every minor inconvenience was a five-alarm fire, and I was always the first responder.
But a threat against my family wasn’t just another fire.
This time, I was lighting a match of my own.
She had no idea that I was walking into her perfect, sterile house with a detailed list of every person she’d ever wronged, and I planned on using her own history to tear her little kingdom down, brick by brick.
The Gathering Storm: The Summons
My phone buzzed on the kitchen island, a frantic, insistent vibration that sounded less like a notification and more like a trapped insect. I didn’t have to look. I knew the specific, neurotic rhythm of her texts. It was a Chloe-quake, a category five on the self-pity scale.
I kept slicing the cucumber for the salad, the rhythmic *thwack* of the knife on the bamboo cutting board a small act of defiance. Mark, my husband, looked up from the mail he was sorting. He didn’t say a word, just raised an eyebrow. That single gesture contained fifteen years of shared history with Chloe, a whole encyclopedia of eye-rolls and exhausted sighs.
The phone buzzed again. And again. A rapid-fire volley.
“Don’t you want to see what national emergency has been declared in her honor today?” Mark asked, his voice dry as toast.
“I’m savoring the mystery,” I said, scraping the cucumber slices into a bowl. “Maybe her manicurist used the wrong shade of beige. Or her Amazon package is running a day late. The possibilities are endless.”
Lily, our sixteen-year-old, wandered in, headphones around her neck, already reaching for the fridge. She glanced at my phone, which was now lighting up with an incoming call, Chloe’s face a heavily filtered selfie from five years ago. Lily winced. “Aunt Chloe’s having a moment, huh?”
Even my daughter, who had grown up with Chloe as a fixture in our lives—the “fun” aunt who always brought inappropriate gifts and made every holiday about her—knew the signs. It wasn’t a friendship anymore. It was a hostage situation, and I was the only one left still negotiating. Everyone else had already escaped. Her brother had moved to Oregon and changed his number. Our old college friends, one by one, had faded out, their polite excuses eventually giving way to a blunt, unified silence.
I was the last one standing, the lone pillar holding up the crumbling temple of Chloe’s ego. And the foundation was cracking. I dried my hands, took a deep breath, and finally picked up the phone. The screen was a wall of text.
*EMERGENCY. CALL ME. NOW.*
*S.O.S. SARAH. I’M SERIOUSLY PANICKING.*
*Are you ignoring me???*
*I can’t believe this is happening. Of course, it’s happening to me.*
I felt the familiar wave of exhaustion wash over me, the weary resignation of a first responder arriving at the same false alarm for the thousandth time. I hit the call button.
The Unraveling Favor
“Finally!” Chloe’s voice was a tight wire of manufactured panic. “I thought you’d been in an accident. I was about to call the hospitals.”
“I was making a salad, Chloe. What’s wrong?” I kept my voice level, a practiced calm I’d perfected over decades. It was the tone one uses for toddlers and cornered animals.
“It’s Pierre,” she wailed, and for a wild second, I wondered who Pierre was. A new boyfriend? A lost pet? “The caterer! For my party! He’s canceled on me.”
I closed my eyes. Her party. The “Celebrating Me!” gala she was throwing for herself next Saturday. Not for a birthday or an anniversary. Just because. She’d sent out embossed invitations and created a hashtag.
“He canceled? Why?” I asked, leaning against the counter. Mark was now openly watching me, a look of grim fascination on his face.
“He said his mother had a stroke! Can you believe the nerve? Using his sick mother as an excuse to ruin my life.”
I processed that. I actually felt my brain stall for a second, trying to find a logical path through the sheer density of her self-absorption. “Chloe, his mother had a stroke. That’s… a legitimate reason.”
“For a lesser event, maybe! But this is my party, Sarah! I have seventy-five people coming. The deposit was non-refundable! What am I supposed to do, serve them Ritz crackers and Cheez Whiz?”
The silence stretched. I could hear her breathing, quick and shallow, the sound of someone working themselves into a genuine frenzy over a completely solvable, first-world problem.
“Okay,” I said slowly, trying to de-escalate. “So, we’ll find another caterer. I can look some up online for you.”
“No, no, you don’t understand!” she snapped. “It has to be *perfect*. Pierre understood the vision. Artisanal charcuterie, vegan tapas, a deconstructed tiramisu tower. You can’t just find that on Yelp.” Then came the inevitable pivot. The one I’d been bracing for. “I need you to fix this.”
“Me? What can I do?”
“You’re a guidance counselor. You guide people. You solve problems. You need to call him. You need to reason with him. Make him see how important this is. You’re good at that stuff. You can be firm, but, you know, empathetic.”
She wanted me to call a man whose mother just had a stroke and convince him that her deconstructed tiramisu tower was more important. That was it. That was the emergency. The absolute, unvarnished, diamond-hard audacity of it almost made me laugh.
“Chloe,” I said, my voice dangerously quiet. “I am not going to do that.”
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