The Inheritance My Husband Tried To Steal
I learned exactly how far that had spread three days later, at Kevin’s sister Melissa’s engagement party, which had been planned for months and which I almost did not attend, given everything. I went anyway, because I wanted to see, with my own eyes, exactly how deep this had gone, and because some stubborn part of me, the same part Ruby had in her, was not about to let Darlene Crowley dictate which rooms I was allowed to walk into.
The party was held in Melissa’s backyard on a warm Saturday evening, string lights strung between two old maples, a long folding table covered in a paper cloth and sweet tea in a glass pitcher sweating condensation in the heat. About thirty people were there, cousins and aunts and old family friends, most of whom I had known for years, some of whom I had truly considered friends in my own right, separate from Kevin entirely. Darlene was holding court near the dessert table when I arrived, her bandaged thumb from the dropped phone incident already turned, in her telling, into some vague story about a kitchen accident, and I watched her face change the moment she saw me cross the yard.
She recovered quickly. Darlene always recovers quickly.
“Rebecca,” she said, loud enough for several nearby conversations to quiet, a smile stretched tight across her face. “We weren’t sure you’d come, after everything. I hope there’s no hard feelings. Families go through rough patches.”
“We went through a rough patch,” I said, keeping my voice level, pleasant even, the voice I use with difficult clients. “You went through bank fraud, Darlene. Those are different things.”
A few people near us went very still. Melissa’s future mother in law, a woman I had met exactly once, looked between us with the particular alertness of someone realizing they have wandered into the middle of something.
Darlene laughed, a short, brittle sound. “That’s quite a word for a family helping each other out. You’ve always had a flair for the dramatic when it comes to money, Rebecca, everyone here knows that about you.”
“Do they,” I said.
And this is the part I am least proud of, in some ways, because I had planned none of it, had not come to that party intending to do what I did next, but something in the way she said everyone here knows that about you, in front of thirty people who had clearly been fed a version of me for months that bore no resemblance to who I actually am, made the decision for me faster than I could think it through.
I took my phone out of my bag.
“I have something I think everyone should actually hear,” I said, “since apparently a lot of people here have opinions about how I handle money that my own grandmother worked sixty years to save.”
Kevin, standing near the grill with a beer in his hand, went very pale very fast. “Rebecca, don’t.”
“I’m not doing anything, Kevin. I’m just going to let people hear what actually happened, instead of whatever your mother’s been telling them for months.”
I pressed play.