Chapter 4: The Heir's Burden

Chapter 4: The Heir's Burden

The Sterling family dinner table was a battlefield disguised by fine china and starched linen napkins. It was a place of unspoken rules and invisible tripwires, and tonight, I was sitting right in the middle of it. Chloe had insisted I stay, her own small act of defiance against her father. He, in turn, tolerated my presence with the simmering disdain of a man forced to entertain a particularly unwelcome insect. Across from me, Mark gave me a subtle, almost imperceptible nod—a silent greeting from one ally to another. Jake was slouched in his chair, poking at his roasted chicken with a fork, his expression one of theatrical boredom that I knew was a cover for keen observation.

But my focus was on Leo.

Leo, the oldest at twenty, was home from college for the weekend. He was the crown prince of the Sterling dynasty, molded in his father's image but lacking his father's brutish certainty. He had the same sharp jawline and serious grey eyes, but where Patrick’s were cold, Leo’s were shadowed with a permanent, weary anxiety. He was handsome, polite, and carried himself with a practiced ease that felt as brittle as spun glass. To me, he’d always just been Chloe's older brother, a distant, untouchable figure in the family hierarchy. But tonight, I needed to see the person, not the position.

The dinner began with a tense silence, punctuated only by the clinking of silverware. Eleanor Sterling tried her best to fill the void, her conversation light and airy as she asked about my classes and Chloe’s friends. It was a valiant, doomed effort. Patrick Sterling was not in the mood for pleasantries.

I recognized the signs from Jake’s earlier intel. Patrick's movements were tight, his sips of wine too frequent. His frustration over the "Harrison deal" was radiating from him like heat off asphalt. And since he couldn't yell at his business partners at the dinner table, he needed a closer target.

"Leo," Patrick said, his voice cutting through Eleanor’s gentle chatter like a shard of glass. "I was looking over your university's course catalog for next semester."

Leo stiffened, his fork pausing halfway to his mouth. "Okay?"

"I see you're still enrolled in that 'History of Cinema' elective," Patrick continued, dabbing his mouth with his napkin. "A complete and utter waste of tuition money and, more importantly, your time. You should be taking advanced macroeconomics."

"It's one class, Dad," Leo said, his voice quiet but strained. "It fills a humanities requirement."

"It fills your head with nonsense," Patrick snapped, his voice rising. "Do you think I built my company by watching movies? I was in the library until midnight, every night, studying market trends, not Fellini. I see your B-plus in Corporate Finance. A B-plus, Leo. It's a gentleman's C. It’s the grade of an observer, not a leader."

The attack was relentless. I watched Leo's composure begin to crack. A muscle in his jaw twitched. His knuckles were white where he gripped his fork. He was taking the hits, absorbing them in silence, just as Chloe had in the living room weeks ago. It was the Sterling way: endure the tyrant’s rage until it passes.

Jake rolled his eyes and muttered just loud enough for me to hear, "And the award for Best Performance by a CEO in a Supporting Guilt-Trip goes to..."

Eleanor shot her youngest son a warning look. "Patrick, please. We have a guest."

"Our guest," Patrick said, his eyes flicking to me for a cold, dismissive instant, "is seeing how a family with high standards operates. Leo needs to understand the pressure. The Harrison deal is at a critical stage. It requires a killer instinct. It requires a man who eats, sleeps, and breathes the business. Not someone who wastes his time analyzing camera angles in black-and-white films."

He had finally connected the dots for everyone. His professional anxiety was being directly channeled into parental disappointment. Leo wasn't just his son; he was his underperforming asset, his faltering stock price, and it was a personal affront.

Leo said nothing. He simply stared at his plate, his face a mask of contained misery. The perfect, polished heir was cracking, and his father was hammering away at the fractures.

This was my moment. But a direct defense would be a fatal error. It would align me against Patrick and force Leo to choose a side, a choice he was not strong enough to make. My strategy had to be indirect. My action, for now, was to listen. To observe. To see the person drowning under the weight of the crown.

When dinner concluded, the tension broke like a fever. Chloe and her mother began clearing the plates, desperate to restore a sense of normalcy. Mark escaped back to his basement sanctuary. Jake vanished upstairs to the sound of virtual explosions. Patrick retreated to his office, the door closing with a heavy, final thud.

Leo was left standing alone in the grand hallway, staring at a portrait of his grandfather, another stern-faced man in a suit. He looked trapped, a ghost haunting his own home.

I found him there on my way to "help" Chloe with the dishes. I stopped a few feet away, not crowding his space.

"That was intense," I said. My voice was quiet, a simple statement of fact, devoid of pity.

Leo startled slightly, not having heard me approach. He ran a hand through his perfectly styled hair, messing it up. "You get used to it." The words were automatic, a well-rehearsed line.

"No, you don't," I countered softly. "You just get better at pretending."

He turned to look at me then, really look at me, for the first time all night. The polite, distant mask was gone. In its place was raw exhaustion. I wasn't just Chloe's friend anymore. I was a witness.

"He's not really angry at you for taking a film class," I said, recalling Jake’s complaints and Patrick’s own words. "He's terrified he's going to lose the Harrison deal. When he feels out of control in the boardroom, he tries to control everything in his house to compensate. You're just the most convenient target."

I hadn't offered sympathy. I had offered analysis. I had taken the emotional shrapnel he'd been peppered with and laid it out on a table, showing him that the wounds weren't personal. They were collateral damage from a different war.

He stared at me, his grey eyes wide with a surprise that slowly morphed into a dawning understanding. No one had ever reframed his father's tirades for him like that. He’d only ever seen them as a reflection of his own failures.

"It must be exhausting," I added, delivering the final, precise strike. "Trying to live up to an expectation that's not even about you. It’s like being forced to play a part in a script someone else wrote, and you're not allowed to improvise."

The metaphor, tailored to his secret passion, landed perfectly. I saw his defenses crumble completely. A shuddering breath escaped him.

"You have no idea," he whispered, the words heavy with years of unspoken pressure. "He wants me to be him. A carbon copy. But I'm... not. I don't have that... that killer instinct. Sometimes I think I'd rather just... I don't know. Watch movies. Make them, maybe."

He had confessed. A small treason against the Sterling empire, spoken aloud for the first time. He had revealed the person beneath the heir.

"There's nothing wrong with that," I said. "Only with pretending to be someone you're not."

He just nodded, looking down at his hands. He didn't need to say anything more. The connection was made. I had stopped being an outsider and had become something else: a confidant. A quiet, secret ally within the walls of his own home. He knew I had seen his burden, not with judgment or pity, but with understanding.

I left him there and went to the kitchen. Chloe was rinsing plates, looking worried. "Are you okay? I'm so sorry about my dad."

"I'm fine," I said, and for the first time, it was the complete truth. "Everything is going exactly according to plan."

The Prince was no longer an obstacle. He was a potential ally, a sympathetic ear within the royal court. Another piece on the board had just turned my color.