The Heiress Trap

“Happy birthday, Ceci!” my three-and-a-quarter-year-old self cheered, chubby hands waving in the air, honey-blonde pigtails—laden with technicolour ribbons—twitching like real pigs’ tails.

Cecily blew out the two candles sitting on her pink Barbie cake and clapped wildly before any of us could do it for her.

Us meant myself, Mum, and Dad.

It had been just the four of us until Dad passed away a few months after the video was taken. Mum remarried and started a brand-new family, and from the age of seven onward, looking after Cecily became my responsibility.

I loved my little sister to bits. She was my whole world, my baby. With Mum completely consumed by our half-brothers, Jaiden and Jason—I took over Ceci because I couldn’t bear the neglect. Ceci was just going on six then. I’d make her breakfast, walk her to and from school, and keep an eye on her at the playground. I braided her hair, read her bedtime stories, and whenever a nightmare woke her up, I’d leap out of my bed and rush into hers to hold her until she slept again.

While in Jack’s house, we learned to live like ghosts. He hated any reminder that we existed, resentful that his wife’s kids were part of the marriage bargain.

The moment I was old enough to work and earn a proper wage, I saved enough to rent a small flat and get us away from him. Ceci could finally thrive in a home free from his toxicity. She threw herself fully into her studies.

She was smart as hell. She earned herself a full scholarship at Wakefield College! Why the fuss? Because that was the secondary school sitting at the very top. It was prestigious, damn exclusive, and brutally difficult to get into, even for the wealthiest of the wealthy. For people like us, knowing the name was enough. We dared not dream of even knowing what the tuition fees were.

And my sister got in—with a perfect score on the Wakefield Trust pilot entrance exam!

The chairman of Wakefield Enterprises, Donald Wakefield himself, stepped onto the podium to hand her the award. That was how impressive my sister was.

I was so proud of her.

She transferred to Wakefield College at the start of the academic year. I drove her to campus myself in my beat-up little VW. When we arrived, I stood there for ten minutes with my mouth open, just taking the school in.

I’d bet not even a university campus could rival those grounds.

The place felt less like a school and more like a private little kingdom. The main buildings, constructed like a sprawling medieval castle, were vast and stood at the centre of acres of manicured lawns, various sports fields and hedged gardens. The girls’ dormitory occupied a fortress at one end, while the boys’ resided in a matching estate at the other, and three massive stone structures in between the dormitories were the academic centres.

Just the sanctuary to leave my little princess, I’d thought at the time.

Ceci called almost every night at first. The first week, her voice was full of light. She loved everything about the school: the majestic lecture halls, the priced libraries with their rare volumes, and her dorm room—a space all her own. After years of sharing a room with me, having that meant everything to her, I could tell. And the food, she said, was fit for royalty.

By the next week, the calls grew shorter and less frequent. She said she was busy with studies. But I didn’t like the dullness in her tone. She sounded exhausted, worn to the bone, and a few times I could have sworn she was crying, even though she argued she was fine.

Once, in the background of a call, I heard a group of girls laughing.

“Hey, slut, have you cleaned the toilet yet!” someone had yelled.

When I asked Cecily if they were referring to her, she had let out a tight, choked laugh and adamantly insisted they were just friends playing around, and quickly hung up.

I worried constantly about her, but not enough to convince me that her troubles were worse than the world she’d left behind—which was still mine: grinding through three jobs and coming home to a cramped flat where I had to crouch if I were to take a shower.

I was wrong. Dead wrong.

And now, my sister was gone.

She wasn’t dead—that would at least offer the mercy of a body I could lay to rest and say goodbye.

Just... gone.

When I got the call from the school—from Ceci’s friend, whom she had told to contact me if she ever needed help—I got in touch with the school immediately.

Even now, the memory of that smooth, detached voice sent goosebumps along my arms and left a bitter taste in my throat. The girl had been worried that Ceci had run away because she didn’t fit in, but I could tell from the administrator’s tone that she found the situation anything but worrisome. She confirmed, offhandedly, that Ceci hadn’t been in school for some time and that she had withdrawn.

She had withdrawn.

On her own.

That was their neat, convenient explanation to keep their school’s reputation, and any responsibility it might bear, entirely out of the picture.

“Then, where is she?”

“I’m afraid I can’t discuss our student’s personal circumstances.”

“I’m her sister,” I had yelled in desperation. “Tell me the truth... did she run away?”

“She has withdrawn, Miss Everest,” she had only repeated.

Her whereabouts were none of their concern, so long as they could prove that Ceci had left the school voluntarily. Eventually, I turned to the police.

Much help it did me.

The officers opened a file, threw me a couple of routine updates over the next forty-eight hours, and then the line went cold. After that, every time I dragged myself into the station, the same tired officer would glance up from her desk and offer me the same empty reassurance.

“We’ve been in touch with the school. We’re looking into it. From all indications, she’s fine. She’ll come back.”

It was clear as day that Wakefield had supplied them with a nice narrative why they needn’t bother pour resources into searching for her.

But what if she never comes back on her own?

I knew my sister better than anyone. Cecily was not a quitter. She had a fire in her to change our destiny, to get the absolute best education possible, land a good job, and drag us both out of the rags we were stuck in. And she was relentless. Hadn’t she already done the impossible by earning her way into Wakefield College—a penniless girl from the slums standing among the elite?

Why would she throw away all that sacrifice and hard work just because a few privileged brats made her life miserable? It didn’t make a single grain of sense.

But everyone else thought it did. Even our own mother couldn’t be bothered to probe.

I wiped a tear from my cheek, watching Cecily’s tiny hands on the screen cut her birthday cake and hand a slice out to me.

We were a happy family back then.

Well, that was all gone now. I just had to find the only other person who still remembered.

I picked up the TV remote and turned it off.

A quiet that left me feeling desolate followed. That always happened. I’d come to rely on the noise to keep the horrid thoughts about my sister at bay whenever I was alone.

It was one in the afternoon—time for my shift at Best Eatery. I was going to have to call in and pass on it again, making four missed shifts in a row. If I kept this up, the manager wouldn’t care that I was frantically searching for my sister; she’d replace me, and I’d lose the little income from that job that helped pay the rent.

I’d worry about that later. After I'd found Ceci.

The rain had eased up. I had to get back out there and continue putting up flyers.

I pulled my hoodie over my head, grabbed the thick stack of missing-person flyers from the table, and stepped back out into the drizzle.

By now, our street and the surrounding blocks were plastered with Cecily’s face, but I kept adding more. Wherever a flyer had been torn down from a lamp post, I replaced it. Whenever someone on the sidewalk paused long enough to make eye contact, I pressed a slip of paper into their hands. I walked up and down the pavement for hours until the sky turned black and my stomach was groaning.

“God, please let today’s effort bring a lead,” I whispered under my breath before opening the door to my apartment.

Inside, it was pitch-black and very quiet. It had never been like this before Cecily left for school. Back then, no matter how late I worked, I’d come home to a lighted room and find her bent over her books at the desk. I quickly looked over her empty table on my way to the fridge beside it. Even so, I couldn’t prevent the hollow ache from resurfacing, along with the deep regret that I ever let her go to that school.

I pulled last night’s leftovers from the fridge, microwaved them, and ate my dinner on the couch in front of the dark TV screen.

The warm food in my stomach seemed to burn away some of my fears, filling me with optimism. Ceci was safe somewhere in this big, wide world, not tied to a chair, bleeding to death. And if I searched hard enough, I would find her and bring her back to me alive.

I pushed down the rest of my food, crawled into bed and stared blindly at the ceiling until sleep finally claimed me.

I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep when something pulled me back out of it. What woke me wasn’t my alarm. The room was still drowned in darkness. It was a text message hitting my phone.

I was about to roll over and ignore it, assuming it was just another late-night spam alert, until two words caught my eye on the lock screen: your sister.

I stared at the message, barely breathing.

Someone knew where Ceci was.

I grabbed the phone so quickly it nearly slipped from my hand, my thumb scrambling to open the message.

I saw your flyer today. You’re looking for your sister, Cecily Everest. I can help with that. Call me.

Beneath the text was a phone number.