Page 4 of The Birthday Girl

Ordinarily, that would not have surprised her.

Alex had always been ambitious. She was the girl who walked into their first lecture with a leather portfolio while everyone else carried cheap spiral notebooks.

She charted her future in bullet points and deadlines, and she rarely strayed from the plan. Her ambition was nothing new.

If Sadie was chaos, Alex was control. Where Sadie leapt without looking, Alex calculated every step before she took it.

She thrived on structure and discipline, just like Tahlia did, which was why they understood each other so well.

Alex never mocked her for being meticulous or teased her for her high standards. Instead, she matched her.

Alex could be blunt to the point of cruelty, but her honesty was the kind that cut through bullshit. Even ten years later, she still pushed Tahlia to aim higher, to demand more, to never settle. Tahlia valued her for that.

What hurt was the lie beneath her message. Alex never allowed last-minute obligations to derail her unless she wanted them to. If she had truly wanted to be here, she would have been. Alex had looked her in the eye and promised to be there. She knew how much the night mattered.

Sadie’s absence hurt because she was supposed to be her joy. Alex’s absence cut deeper because she was supposed to be her constant. Tahlia thought she could depend on her, but the message proved otherwise.

Each excuse repeatedly ripped through her until she could hardly breathe, and by midnight, she was one and a half bottles in and laughing bitterly at the absurdity of it all. She stood in a ballroom with enough seats for five hundred people, and not a single chair was filled.

Her staff, still pressed against the walls, avoided her eyes whenever she looked up.

Even so, their awareness pricked at her, a quiet pressure in the room.

Humiliation was alive, wrapping around her ribs until she thought she might scream.

However, instead, she forced her throat to open, tipped back her glass, and swallowed until the champagne scalded away the taste of bile.

When she had had enough, she slammed the glass onto the table.

“Everyone, get out. Go home. Your services are no longer needed.” Her voice was calm, though inside, she was seething.

Trays clattered against tables. Heels clicked too quickly across the floor.

No one looked at her directly, but their shoulders relaxed with every step toward the exit.

The last waiter paused at the door, his hand hovering over the light switch until she shook her head.

The heavy door sealed with a soft thud as her breathing echoed off the walls, bouncing between empty chairs.

She poured another glass and watched the bubbles hiss and die. Maybe that was all she was good for, disappearing quietly while everyone else drank their fill.

Somewhere between the champagne and the humiliation, a new sensation crystallized behind her eyes. She didn’t cry. Not a single drop. Instead, she stared at her reflection in the black glass of the ballroom windows and saw not a wounded woman but something newly tempered.

Tahlia was tired of being the butt of everyone’s joke. She thought of the servers and their sideways glances, her family and their obligatory texts, and her boyfriend and his community dick. They expected her to endure their bullshit quietly, politely, as always.

A sob clawed its way up her throat, but she strangled it before it could escape. She wouldn’t give them that. She wouldn’t give anyone that.

The party was supposed to be for her, but it had never truly been about her. It was about the spectacle, the expectation, the illusion that she was loved, and that she was wanted.

Fuck them. All of them.

She no longer believed in the myth of unconditional love.

The well-meaning lies parents fed their children about being special, being irreplaceable, and being worthy of care simply for existing meant nothing.

She had discarded all of it. Love was finite, transactional, and her account had been in the red for years. No one ever deposited anything into it.

In the raw, glittering silence of that pillaged ballroom, she made herself a promise. She would never again wait for a chair to be filled. She would overturn every last one, light the room on fire, and watch the smoke rise with a smile.

The whole world would remember her name. And September 14th…

Her birthday. She would never forget it.

That was the day everything solid beneath her gave way, plunging her into waters too dark and too cold to survive unchanged.

The rupture was instant and irreversible, and she would spend months gasping for air in that darkness, every breath rattling with phantom water.

Before that night, she thought she understood pain and betrayal. Even rage. She had been wrong.

September 14th was the day she decided she wanted to kill someone. The taste of it coated her tongue until swallowing became impossible. Then it spread. Into her lungs, every breath stolen. Into her fists, every muscle clenched with rage.

Fury did not just infect her blood. It rewrote her DNA. She was not herself anymore. She was something else. Something terrible.

The whole world will remember my name.