Travis’s breath hitched. He grabbed the back of a dining chair to steady himself. “What… what are you talking about?”
“She didn’t invest it, Travis,” I said coldly. “She used it to settle a private fraud investigation with the South Dakota Consumer Protection Division after she sold forty thousand dollars worth of counterfeit Chanel and Prada bags to eight elderly women in Spearfish and Sturgis. If she hadn’t paid them off under an NDA, she would already be sitting in a federal penitentiary.”
I dropped the police file onto the table with a deafening *thud*.
“So go ahead, Travis. File your lawsuit. Call Child Protective Services. Have Arthur Vance submit that confession of judgment to a judge tomorrow morning.”
I zipped up my briefcase, picked it up, and turned toward the front door.
“Let’s see who ends up in a cell by Friday.”
For ten seconds, the only sound in the house was the rhythmic, frantic panting of my brother Travis.
He stood by the dining table, his knuckles pressed so hard into the mahogany wood that the skin looked paper-thin. His eyes moved frantically from the certified appraisal report, to the affidavit from Minneapolis, to the thick police file with the Pennington County seal stamped on the cover.
Then, slowly, mechanically, Travis turned his head toward his wife.
“Vanessa,” he whispered.
The sound wasn’t angry. It was hollow. It was the sound of a man standing on a bridge, watching the support cables snap one by one.
“Travis, baby, listen to me,” Vanessa cried, her voice ascending into a shrill, manic panic. She rushed toward him, reaching for his arms, but he recoiled from her touch as if she were a venomous snake. “She’s twisting everything! Rebecca hates me! She’s been jealous of me since the day we met! She hacked my accounts—she paid those people to write those lies!”
“Shut up,” Travis said.
“Travis, please!”
“I said SHUT UP!”
The roar tore from Travis’s throat with such ferocious power that the crystal sconces on the wall rattled. My mother let out a terrified whimper, shrinking back into the sofa cushions, while my father slowly rose from his recliner, his face pale, his jaw slack with shock.
Travis snatched the police file off the table. His hands shook violently as he flipped through the pages—the bank statements showing wire transfers to overseas shell accounts, the cease-and-desist letters from the state attorney general, the signatures on the secret settlement agreements.
“The college fund?” Travis choked out, tears of absolute humiliation and rage spilling over his lids. “You took Harper’s money? You took Nolan’s money? To pay off people you scammed?!”
“I was going to put it back!” Vanessa shrieked, backing away toward the kitchen island, her manicured fingers clawing at her own hair. “My supplier promised me a shipment of authentic overstock! I was trying to build something for us, Travis! I was trying to give us the life we deserved! Look at how your parents live! Look at what your sister is—a dirty, low-class laborer! I didn’t want to be poor! I didn’t want our kids to look like trailer trash!”
“Trailer trash?”
The voice didn’t come from me. It didn’t come from Travis.
It came from my mother.
Diane Mercer stood up from the sofa. The pious, gentle matriarch persona she had worn like a mask for forty years was gone. Her face was contorted into a mask of pure, incandescent fury.
“You took my grandson’s college fund?” my mother hissed, stepping toward Vanessa. “Travis gave you everything! We welcomed you into this home! We gave you our grandmother’s silver! We defended you! We turned against our own flesh and blood for you!”
“Oh, shut up, Diane!” Vanessa spat, cornered and completely unmasked now. All the southern-belle sweetness, all the delicate socialite pretense vanished, revealing the vicious, feral predator underneath. “You didn’t defend me because you loved me! You defended me because you’re a pathetic, shallow old woman who loved bragging to her church friends about her son’s wealthy wife! You hated Rebecca because she reminded you of how poor you started out! You used me to feel superior, and now you want to play the martyr?!”
My mother stopped as if she had been slapped across the face. She gasped, clutching her chest, looking around the room for support that was no longer there.
Arthur Vance, meanwhile, had already packed his leather briefcase. He didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t look at Travis. He slipped quietly out the front door, the latch clicking shut behind him with the finality of a closing tomb.
Travis dropped the papers onto the floor.
He looked at Vanessa. For five years, he had treated this woman like a queen. He had bought her the luxury cars, paid for the vacations, defended her cruelty, and let her alienate his sister and his niece. He had allowed her to convince him that cruelty was just “standards” and that arrogance was “class.”
