Chapter 6 - Brian Chose His Wife
Brian refused to believe it.
Not immediately.
He came to Megan’s condo carrying printed emails Brianna had given him.
“Paul says these are investment advances.”
Claire read them.
“They’re descriptions. Not authorizations.”
Brian looked at me.
“You think my wife stole six hundred thousand dollars?”
“I think I want to know where it went.”
“Same thing.”
“No.”
He rubbed both hands over his face.
“I’m not doing this.”
That sentence made me angrier than shouting would have.
“Doing what?”
“Choosing between my mother and my wife.”
Megan spoke from the kitchen.
“Brianna already made you choose. She just didn’t tell you.”
Brian turned on her.
“Stay out of my marriage.”
Jason stood.
“That’s my mother too.”
I raised one hand.
Everyone stopped.
I looked at Brian.
“You don’t need to choose between us.”
Relief flickered across his face too soon.
“You need to choose whether you want facts.”
His expression hardened again.
Before leaving, he said something that told me exactly where we stood.
“Until there’s proof, Brianna is my wife.”
I nodded.
“And until there’s proof, I’m your mother.”
He had no answer.
That night Brian removed himself as my emergency contact.
He said he needed distance.
It hurt.
But something else happened too.
Brianna called me seventeen times.
I answered none of them.
On the eighteenth call, she left a voicemail.
“You’re digging into things Samuel understood perfectly well.”
I replayed it.
My dead husband’s name had not appeared once in our financial questions.
Not once.
May you like
Yet Brianna had brought him into it.
That meant there was history I did not know.
