From Lottery Winner to Public Enemy Number One
Megan Connolly’s voice, amplified by her phone’s cheap microphone, sliced through the quiet afternoon of Providence Creek.
“He’s been bleeding this town dry for twenty years, and now he wants to sell us expired trash for one last shakedown!”
She stood in front of Walter’s General Store, phone held high like a torch, broadcasting her crusade to a small, captive audience on a livestream.
Behind her, a handful of townsfolk murmured, their faces a mixture of confusion and brewing resentment.
The camera panned across the hand-painted sign in the store window: “COMMUNITY APPRECIATION SALE. EVERYTHING MUST GO.”
“Community appreciation?” Megan scoffed, her voice dripping with venom. “This is a slap in the face. He hits the jackpot and decides the first thing he’ll do is screw over the very people who kept him in business.”
Inside, the man at the heart of the storm, Walter Kendrick, stood frozen behind the counter.
A dark flush crept up his neck, his knuckles white where he gripped the worn handle of a broom.
The air crackled with the unspoken fury of a man whose lifelong decency had just been spat on.
He wasn’t a corporate shark. He was Walt.
The man who extended credit when the mill shut down, who slipped extra candy to kids, whose dusty ledger held more IOUs than a small-town bank.
Just days ago, his daughter Alina had called him, her voice trembling with a joy so profound it felt seismic.
She had won.
Not a small scratch-off prize, but the Powerball.
A number so large it felt like a clerical error.
Enough to finally, finally let him rest.
“You’re closing up, Dad,” she had said, her voice firm over the crackling line from Austin. “No more seventy-hour weeks. No more worrying about the new Dollar General gutting your margins. You’re done.”
His first thought, after the shock, was of his neighbors.
“I can’t just shut the doors, Ali,” he’d argued. “There’s a whole store of inventory. It wouldn’t feel right.”
So they’d decided on one last sale.
A final thank you.
Prices slashed not for profit, but to give back.
And now, this.
Megan, the little girl he’d watched grow up, the one who’d scraped her knee on his porch a hundred times, was painting him as a monster.
For a crime he hadn’t even conceived of.
§02
The livestream feed was shaky, but Megan’s narrative was brutally clear.
She held up a receipt, waving it dramatically in front of the camera.
“Look at this! From ‘The Final Stop Grocer’ just outside the city. Milk, two for five dollars! The same brand Walter here is selling for seven, and he calls that a discount!”
Liu, a mother of three who bought milk by the gallon, stepped forward, her brow furrowed. “Is that true, Megan? You saw it yourself?”
Megan gave a self-righteous nod. “Clear as day. And that’s their everyday price. Walter’s ‘sale’ is just a scam to clear out his old stock before he runs off with his millions.”
The accusation hung in the air, thick and poisonous.
Walter, a man of simple truths, felt his words get stuck in his throat.
He wanted to scream about expiration dates, about the difference between a salvage grocer selling near-date products and his own fresh stock.
He wanted to ask Megan if she’d conveniently forgotten to mention that crucial detail.
But his voice was lost in the rising tide of suspicion.
“He always was a bit pricey,” someone muttered from the back.
“And his daughter,” another added, “drives that fancy electric car. The money had to come from somewhere.”
That car. Alina’s Lucid Air.
A machine so sleek and silent it looked like it had time-traveled from the future when she visited.
It was a symbol of her world, a world of algorithms and venture capital that Providence Creek could neither understand nor forgive.
Walter fumbled for his phone, his thumb trembling as he dialed his daughter’s number.
He was a man who had faced down suppliers, weathered economic downturns, and buried his wife with quiet dignity.
But this, this public shaming built on a foundation of lies, felt like a current he couldn’t fight alone.
“Ali,” he whispered when she answered, his voice hoarse. “There’s… there’s a problem.”
§03
Alina Kendrick was in a different universe.
A universe of clean glass, brushed steel, and the quiet hum of servers processing terabytes of data.
Her Austin apartment, thirty floors above the bustling city, was a testament to a life built on logic and precision.
Her father’s strained voice on the phone was an anomaly, a glitch in the system.
“What kind of problem, Dad?” she asked, swiveling in her ergonomic chair to face the panoramic window.
As he explained, his words tumbling out in a pained, fragmented narrative, Alina’s calm expression slowly hardened.
She pulled up Megan’s livestream on her second monitor.
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