Chapter 40 40
One week later.
The automatic doors of a suburban Walmart opened with a hydraulic sigh that felt like mockery.
“Venice. Era. Clock in now,” barked their new manager—a no-nonsense woman named Debra with an arm tattoo that read ‘Family. Hustle. Beef.’
Dressed in navy polos tucked awkwardly into beige khakis, the McLaren sisters were nearly unrecognizable. Their lips glossless. Their designer bags swapped for Walmart-issued aprons with wrinkled name tags: Ven and Erah.
Venice scanned a family-sized cereal box of Fruity Hoops and forced a smile so tight it might crack her contour.
“Do you want a bag?” she asked through gritted teeth.
The customer blinked. “Uh, yeah?”
Venice bagged the cereal with the grace of a royal falling down a flight of stairs.
“Do you want to cry about it in the break room?” Era whispered behind her as she chucked a can of pinto beans onto the belt. It rolled off and hit the floor with a dramatic clunk.
“Oh, go flirt with a microwave, Era.”
“At least microwaves don’t lie on resumes.”
Their shift was agony.
By the time lunch came, they were in the employee breakroom—sharing a lukewarm container of spaghetti and one working plastic fork. A greasy fan hummed in the corner. One microwave. No dignity.
“You said I was going to work in fashion consulting,” Venice snapped.
“You said I had a corporate face, and now I’m eating clearance pasta with you,” Era retorted.
Venice pointed her fork like a weapon. “I gave up my aesthetic for this. My identity. I had a lash appointment!”
“I had a future!” Era shrieked.
The spaghetti flew.
One meatball soared. A chunk of red sauce splattered across the “Employee of the Month” wall. Venice screamed. Era ducked. Someone opened the door, saw the carnage, and backed out slowly.
It was absurd.
Humiliating.
Tragic.
But worst of all?
They weren’t even fired.
Because no one cared enough to fire them.
They weren’t McLarens anymore.
They were aisle workers.
Krystal’s silence wasn’t just revenge—it was redefinition. She didn’t destroy them. She just let the world see what they’d always been.
And the world responded exactly how Krystal expected:
“Do you want a bag?”
IVY’S FALL — FROM LUXE LIVING TO LATTE FOAM
Rejection. Rejection. Rejection.
It came in all fonts and email signatures—from “Thank you for your interest” to the ever-polite “We’ve chosen to move in another direction.” Ivy McLaren had once been the direction. She was brunch personified. Beige trench coats, tiny sunglasses, croissants that cost more than rent—she was Luxe Living’s favorite influencer cover girl just a year ago. Now?
She stirred drip coffee with a plastic stick behind a tiny café counter in the grimiest part of Brooklyn. Her name tag read “Ives” because someone misprinted it and management didn’t think it was “worth the fix.”
Her apron smelled like oat milk and despair. She hadn’t had a proper manicure in three months. A ferret—not even a dog, a ferret—tried to chew her sock while its owner rattled off a confusing order of decaf, sugar-free, low-foam latte with mushroom collagen.
“Would you like oat or almond milk?” Ivy asked sweetly, lips twitching.
The customer blinked. “Both.”
She didn’t even flinch anymore.
Inside, though? Every tip jar coin felt like a slap from karma. Every “girlboss” poster on the wall felt like mockery.
The worst part? Someone recognized her.
“Weren’t you in Luxe Living last year?” a girl asked, tapping her phone.
“No,” Ivy lied, dead-eyed, while wiping whipped cream off her apron. “That must’ve been my cousin.”
Outside, the rain poured. She had no umbrella. No taxi fare. Only a single knockoff Prada purse with fraying edges and a resume soaked at the bottom. She walked home in soggy shoes, muttering, “At least it wasn’t the Comfort Leaf.”
But someone else got that fate.
MJ: FROM INFLUENCER TO 2-STAR REALITY CHECK
MJ McLaren, former glam goddess, humanitarian-influencer, and serial poster of staged Bali meditations, now greeted guests in a polyester vest behind a cheap wood-paneled desk.
“Welcome to the Comfort Leaf Motel,” she said for the fiftieth time that day. “Yes, we spray for bedbugs weekly. One keycard or two?”
The drunk couple in front of her couldn’t stop arguing.
“She booked the wrong hotel on purpose!” the man shouted.
“You said budget-conscious!” the woman shrieked back.
MJ stared ahead blankly.
This wasn’t her life. This couldn’t be her life.
She once fake-hosted a charity gala just to get on a guest list. She wore gowns that cost more than an intern’s salary. And now?
“MJ, smile,” barked her balding manager, stomping by with pit stains under his khaki vest. “You look like a corpse.”
She grit her fake teeth—half of which were chipped now, thanks to a late payment at her old dentist—and hissed, “I amsmiling.”
Her reception desk was sticky. Her nails were popping off. Her “famous glow” was now drugstore foundation mixed with stress-induced acne. And her DMs? No brands. No deals. No flights.
The only influencer thing she could now post was: “How to survive on $0.0003 and lukewarm vending machine coffee.”
She cried on her fifteen-minute break in a storage closet filled with toilet paper and roaches that were somehow alsotenants.
BACK AT THE WALMART
Venice scanned ramen noodle packs like they’d wronged her. Era muttered insults under her breath. They had one working pan, three forks, and exactly two ego shards left between them.
“Bag or no bag?” Venice snapped.
“Do you want a breakdown or just a receipt?” Era countered.
They argued in the breakroom over who used all the instant coffee.
They argued in their apartment over whether Krystal was watching and laughing.
(Spoiler: She was. Quietly. With wine. From her penthouse.)
Elias McLaren had always been good at two things: lying through his teeth and dressing the part. Unfortunately, with his wardrobe now reduced to three wrinkled linen shirts and pajama pants that said “#BossLife”, his illusion of grandeur was cracking like a cheap wineglass under pressure.
He refused—refused—to accept that the golden McLaren era was over.
He still had connections. Or so he told himself. And everyone unfortunate enough to be within earshot.
All day long, he lounged shirtless on a half-deflated beanbag chair in their cramped one bedroom apartment—an apartment that used to be a wine cellar turned gaming den but was now housing five broke adults, one working frying pan, and approximately seven hundred grudges.
With an old Bluetooth headset on, he made “business” calls, chest puffed up like a delusional peacock. “Of course, we’re liquidating for tax reasons,” he said smoothly to an unimpressed loan shark, crossing his legs like a tech CEO.
The loan shark on the other end grunted. “You owe me twelve grand, Eli. Not opinions.”
Elias winced and whispered to Norma, “Do we have anything left to sell?”
Norma didn’t even look up from her calculator. “You mean aside from your dignity and our microwave? No.”
He made a frustrated sound in his throat and leaned dramatically back. “People like us don’t just fall. We pivot.”
Norma blinked at him. “You pivoted us into bankruptcy.”
Still, he wouldn’t give up. He tried selling old luxury watches—most were knockoffs. He called his “old buddies from finance,” who had long deleted his number. He DM’ed influencers, pitching a podcast about “resilience and wealth mindset.” One replied with: “LMAO is this satire?”
Every night, he scrolled through photos of their mansion, their boats, their velvet-rope parties. And every morning, he put on a fake Rolex and dialed another ex-friend, pretending he was still relevant.
He wasn’t.