My Mom Hid Gold In Her Truffle Box Chapter 05

My Mom Hid Gold In Her Truffle Box Chapter 05

The room went dead silent.

Everyone just stared at me, as if the words hadn’t quite registered.

“Solid gold? What solid gold?” My aunt was the first to speak, her face blank with shock.

“Eleanor, what are you talking about?” My uncle’s brow furrowed.

Mom lifted a shaking hand and pointed at me. “You… you…”

But Chloe wasn’t rattled. She exploded.

“Eleanor, stop making things up!”

“Mom gives me one lousy truffle, and you get a ten-pound bag of solid gold, but somehow we’re the bad guys?”

“You’re not walking out of here until you pay me back for every ounce of that gold!”

I looked at her, at the greed and ignorance sitting right there on the surface.

Something inside me stopped hurting and went numb.

“Ten pounds of solid gold?” The laugh that came out of me was hollow.

“Chloe, are you actually insane?”

“You really think that’s what I got?”

I ripped open the ten-pound bag. Foil-wrapped truffles spilled across the table.

I grabbed one, peeled back the foil, and held it up for the whole room to see: a plain chocolate shell, ganache filling, nothing else.

“Take a good look. This is the ten pounds of solid gold everyone’s been screaming about.”

The relatives glanced at one another. Nobody said a word.

“Aren’t those just… regular truffles?” my aunt murmured.

Chloe faltered, but only for a second.

“How do we know you didn’t hide the gold and swap these in to trick us?”

“You think we’re all stupid?”

I took a breath. A long one. The urge to slap her was almost more than I could hold back.

My eyes went to Chloe’s gift box, the single artisan truffle still sitting on the table. Gold-stamped fall leaves covered the lid. It looked like it cost more than everything else on the table combined.

I reached for the ribbon.

Mom let out a raw, animalistic scream and lunged at me.

She clutched the box against her chest, eyes wild.

“This is Chloe’s. You can’t touch it!”

“You have a whole bag of truffles. Why do you need to take hers, too?”

“Let go.” My voice didn’t waver.

“Everyone in this room is going to see what’s inside this box. Today.”