PARTIALITY

Over the next three years, I rose fast.

From analyst to team lead, then Deputy Director of Investments, and by twenty-eight — just six months before the events of this story — I was named Chief Financial Officer, overseeing the entire Mergers & Acquisitions division for the whole group, with my own office looking out over Frankfurt’s famous skyline.

I bought an apartment in Westend under my own name, a car I paid off early, and built up a solid portfolio of savings and investments.

But in front of my family, I was still just Anna with “an ordinary office job” — still showing up to my parents’ place in Bockenheim in a plain sweater, still sending money home every month like clockwork, still sitting quietly in the corner at dinner, giving Lukas the better cuts.

Lukas was twenty-four now.

After years of unstable freelancing, my mother finally called in a favor and got him a job as a designer at a small advertising agency in Frankfurt — a salary my parents still had to top up monthly, because Lukas spent freely.

He’d started seeing a woman named Sophie, from a well-off family in the villa suburb of Kronberg, and the two decided to get engaged.

The engagement — in my mother’s words — had to “look the part,” since Sophie’s family had money, and we couldn’t lose face in front of the in-laws.

The cost of the celebration and the traditional gifts came to nearly thirty thousand euros — a figure our family had no way of covering.

My mother called, her voice a mix of sweet and urgent: “Anna, help me out this once, think of it as good karma for your own future.

If your brother marries well, the whole family benefits down the line.

You’re not married yet, what are you saving for anyway — just let me handle it for your brother first.”

I didn’t object.

I transferred twenty-five thousand euros into my mother’s account, without a word of complaint, without telling anyone where the money came from.

For someone at my income level, it wasn’t a real burden — but the way she treated it as a given, as simply “a sister’s duty,” was what kept chilling something inside me, bit by bit.