“Megan, I really thought we were—”

“So all of it was a lie,” she said.

It was not a question.

She picked up her handbag and walked out the front door and did not look back, and in the space of five minutes my brother lost the woman he had been trying to impress with my salary and an inheritance that had never once been his.

Chapter 20 — When You Have Nothing Left to Offer

My mother, of course, would not accept it.