The words landed wrong, like a sentence in a language I barely understood.
“Please.”
“I said leave.”
I started to close the door. Her foot stopped it.
“Everything I did, I did for you.”
The words landed wrong, like a sentence in a language I barely understood.
“That has to be the cruelest thing you’ve ever said to me,” I told her.
A year of unanswered questions sat in my chest like a stone
“Come with me. One hour. If it still means nothing after that, I’ll never knock on this door again.”
I looked at her hands. They were shaking around the folder.
A year of unanswered questions sat in my chest like a stone, and I hated that the stone shifted when she spoke.
“Where?”
“A law office across town. Marcus is there. So is a man named Ellis.”
“Who is Ellis?”
I watched the streetlights slide across her face and tried to hold on to my anger.
“Someone who’s been waiting a long time to meet you.”
I grabbed my jacket without knowing why.
She drove in silence. I watched the streetlights slide across her face and tried to hold on to my anger, but it kept slipping.
The office was small, beige, ordinary. The man in the gray suit — Ellis, the lawyer — stood when we entered. Beside him sat Marcus, the financial advisor who had handled my parents’ estate for as long as I could remember.
“What is this?” I asked.
She placed the folder on the table and slid it halfway toward me.
“Sit down,” Kayla said. “Please.”
I sat because my legs decided for me.
She placed the folder on the table and slid it halfway toward me, then stopped, like she wasn’t sure she had the right.
“Gabriel has been stealing from the trust,” she said.
I laughed. It came out ugly.
“That’s what this is? You slept with my brother for a year, and now you want me to believe he’s the villain?”
