OP-DEC: Operation Deceit

The year is 1933. Eleven-year-old Claire Healey, cherubic-faced and curious, crept from her bed. The sounds of her parents' return from a flamboyant Boston party usually meant exciting stories. Tonight, however, their voices were sharp, cutting through the grand silence of their Brookline home.

From the top of the stairs, hidden in shadows, Claire watched. Her socialite mother, usually radiant, gripped the sofa arm, her face strained with agony. Her industrial-tycoon father paced, bellowing terrible words that echoed through the parlor. Claire’s heart thumped. She’d never seen him like this.

“You’re delusional,” her father snarled, suggesting a doctor. But her mother hissed back, “It’s you who’s sick. How could you do this to us?” She accused him of being “a twisted man in love with money and power.”

The air crackled with a chilling tension Claire couldn't understand. Her father’s forced, consoling laugh carried a warning, a shrewdness she recognized from his business dealings. He was using it on Mother. What had he done?

Later that night, Claire’s mother made a hushed call to Aunt Noreen, begging her to take Claire away. The next morning, her mother was gone, taken by two men in white. Her father claimed she was ill, but Claire knew, deep down, it was a lie. As Aunt Noreen whisked Claire away to New York, leaving behind the dark secrets of the Boston mansion, a seed of doubt and a yearning for truth began to grow.