Episode 20

Jeffrey Sanner watched his brothers, Douglas and Kim, from across the polished mahogany table. Their faces, usually etched with the self-importance of men who believed themselves masters of their own destinies, were contorted with a familiar, venomous envy. It was directed, as always, at the ghost of their sister, Katja. Even in her absence, even after all these years, her memory was a festering wound in their collective psyche.

He’d always been the quiet one, the observer. While Douglas chased the thrill of high-stakes finance, a man whose past was as murky as the bottom of a forgotten harbor, and Kim meticulously built his empire on the same ill-gotten gains, Jeffrey had focused on the tangible. Construction. Estimating. The solid, undeniable reality of brick and mortar. Yet, even he, the pragmatist, felt the insidious pull of that same, irrational resentment.

It wasn't just about the inheritance, though that had been the initial spark. It was something deeper, something tied to their parents, to the oppressive shadow of their upbringing. Their parents, themselves creatures of rigid expectation and quiet desperation, had instilled a peculiar brand of ambition in their sons. Ambition that seemed to require the crushing of anything pure, anything unblemished. And Katja, their sister, had been exactly that. The white sheep in a flock of wolves.