I told him to delete the photographs. He laughed, walked past me, and complained to Mom that I was getting arrogant. She acted offended when I changed the studio lock and put a small security camera above the bookshelf. “Your own brother would never steal from you,” she said. I wanted her to be right so badly that I almost apologized again.
.
But the photographs bothered me. I began checking that my digital files were backed up, and I kept records of every revision to the design. I thought I was guarding against carelessness and perhaps a brother who didn’t understand professional boundaries. I had no idea he’d already shown my work to investors as if it were his.
Two days before the final presentation, I left work early to pick up the portfolio case I’d forgotten at home. The garage hallway was quiet until I heard something snap. I smelled cement, and my stomach turned before I even reached the studio door.
Logan stood with a construction bucket tipped over my model. Thick gray cement rolled across the clear roof of the rehabilitation wing. Tiny supports snapped beneath its weight. The little trees folded over. I shouted his name and ran toward the table, but he emptied the bucket before I reached him.
I dropped to my knees and tried to lift pieces out. Cement coated my hands and stung my skin. An acrylic edge cut one finger. I barely noticed. Three months of late nights lay under a heavy, spreading mess, and all I could think about was how little time remained before the committee expected to see the model.
“Please,” I said, looking up at my brother. “This is my entire future.”
He stared down at me with a strange, satisfied look. “Now nobody gets to choose you over me.”
Then I heard my mother laugh. She was standing against the doorframe, close enough to have stopped him, and she looked almost relieved. “You were never going to succeed anyway,” she said. “At least now you can stop embarrassing yourself.”
Something about her certainty hurt more than the ruined model. I had spent years telling myself she didn’t understand my profession, that she favored Logan without meaning to, that someday she’d see what I could do. But she understood perfectly well that this project mattered to me. She was watching it be destroyed and calling that a solution.