Chapter 4: The Separation of Worlds
Within twenty minutes, the house was transformed into two completely distinct universes.
In the formal dining room, Harper, her mother Evelyn, and their ten corporate guests sat in rigid, humiliated silence around an empty mahogany table set with crystal goblets that held only water. Harper’s phone buzzed continuously on the table with margin calls and corporate debt notices, but she did not have the courage to pick it up.
In the vast open kitchen and living room, eighty neighbors gathered around the roaring hearth. Folding tables had been set up alongside the granite island, groaning beneath the weight of rustic, home-cooked food.
Children sat on the braided rugs, dipping warm bread into rich beef stew while old fiddlers tuned their instruments by the Christmas tree.
Martha moved among her neighbors, pouring hot cider, wrapping elderly widows in warm wool throws, and laughing with the young apprentices from the town vocational shop.
Greg stood alone in the hallway connecting the two rooms, trapped in the doorway between the hollow life he had purchased and the honest roots he had betrayed.
He watched his mother laugh with an old woodcutter who had worked with his father forty years ago. For five years, Greg had convinced himself that success meant never having dirt on his boots, never looking backward, and surrounding himself with people whose love had a price tag.
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Looking at the empty, resentful faces in his dining room, Greg realized with devastating clarity that he was the poorest man in the county.
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