“Return the ten thousand dollars you took from my marriage first,” she said, and the hallway went silent, because they hadn’t known she had the records.

Chapter 18 — The Collapse

The truth came apart quickly after that, the way these things do once the covering money stops.

Under legal pressure, Ansel handed over everything — the texts, the promissory notes, recordings in which Sorrel admitted forging the documents — and he filed a formal report against Brody, who had, it turned out, tried to take out fraudulent loans using Ansel’s identity too.

Brody had run a real scam, and Sorrel had gone along with it out of greed and then lied to her own family to hide the losses, and Wilhelmina had known the whole time and pressured her son to pay anyway, because to her a brother was simply obligated to save his sister at any cost.

With no one left to bankroll them, Brody skipped the state in the middle of the night, taking the car.