Brother, This April Fools’ Day Is the Last One Chapter 05

Brother, This April Fools’ Day Is the Last One Chapter 05

Mom’s screams filled the house. The repair guy backed away, and no one else moved.

Oliver hadn’t moved. He couldn’t make sense of it, how an oven that had been dead for years could

have killed me.

And why hadn’t I come out? He hadn’t locked it. None of it made sense, and the confusion was

spiraling into panic.

Lily stood next to him, and she didn’t look shocked. When she saw my body, she flinched, but it was

all for show. She ducked behind Oliver, playing the terrified little sister.

But her eyes gave her away. There was more excitement in them than fear. I was gone, and now she

was the only daughter.

Every scrap of attention in this family would be hers now. I could see it in the way she carried herself, this was exactly what she’d wanted.

She’d felt that way since the day I came back from Oakville. My parents didn’t love me, they’d made that clear, but they still spent a fortune sending me to private school.

Lily never understood why, and no one ever bothered to explain it to her. Her tantrums turned into pranks, and the pranks never stopped.

What started as cruelty grew into something worse. By the end, they were trying to kill me for real.

“What the hell is going on?”

My dad shoved past everyone. When he saw what was on the floor, charred, shriveled, barely recognizable as a person, he recoiled in horror.

Lily grabbed Oliver’s arm. “Oliver, don’t freak out. That’s not Chloe. It can’t be. She probably found some gross prop somewhere and set this whole thing up to scare us.”

“Remember what she pulled with Mr. Miller? She staged that whole thing, and nobody bought it.

This is the same thing.”

It worked. Oliver’s mind went straight to what happened years ago, when I’d called the police on

Mr. Miller without my parents’ knowing.

I’d given my statements. I’d described what he did to me, every detail, again and again. The case

made me relive it so many times I finally broke.

I kept going anyway. And none of it mattered, Mr. Miller told them I’d made it all up, that nothing had happened, and they believed him.

After that, I became the girl who cried wolf, the girl who made things up for attention. Oliver still

saw me that way.

He stared at the black shape on the floor. “Unbelievable. First she made up that whole story about Mr. Miller assaulting her, and now she’s trying to pin a murder on us.”

Lily nodded. “You can’t even tell what that thing is supposed to be.”

“Besides, the oven’s been broken for years. What are the odds it suddenly starts working the second we put her in there? Come on.”

That was all Oliver needed to hear. The fear drained out of his face, and he turned to our parents. This was a prank, he told them, just another one of Chloe’s stunts.

“Chloe Vance! Come out!”

Some of the panic eased out of Mom’s face when she heard that. She grabbed Dad’s arm.

“Look at what your daughter’s doing, she’s trying to put me in an early grave. She knows about my

heart condition and she pulls this?”

My dad’s jaw tightened. Year after year, I’d watched any shred of affection he had for me vanish,

and now it was gone entirely.

If I hadn’t gotten into a good college, he would have shipped me off to some troubled teen program

just to get rid of me.

He walked over to the black shape on the floor and kicked it, hard.

“Chloe, get out here!”

“I vouched for you. I told Mr. Miller you’d grown up, that you were done pulling these stunts. And you do this, on purpose, because you knew he was coming?”