Chapter 4: The Name on the Screen
"Who is Daniel Marsh?" Nick said.
Susan didn't answer.
She walked to the far end of the patio and stood with her back to us, one hand gripping the railing.
"Mom."
"It's nothing."
"A year of messages is not nothing."
Richard sat down heavily in one of the patio chairs.
He looked like a man who had been carrying something for a long time and had just set it down and wasn't sure he could pick it back up.
"Tell them," he said.
"Or I will."
Susan turned around.
Her expression had changed.
The hardness was still there, but underneath it something else had surfaced.
Not guilt.
Something closer to calculation.
"Daniel Marsh is a family attorney," she said.
Nick waited.
"I consulted him.
About the estate."
"Whose estate?"
She looked at Richard.
A long look.
The kind that carries an entire argument inside it.
"Your grandfather's," she said.
Nick went still.
"Grandad's estate was settled years ago.
Dad inherited everything."
"Not everything."
Richard closed his eyes.
"There was a secondary account," Susan said.
"Your grandfather set it up separately.
It was meant to pass directly to you — to Nick — when you married." She paused.
"The condition was that you had to be married.
A legal marriage.
Not engaged.
Married."
The air on the patio felt different.
"How much?" Nick said.
Susan folded her hands in front of her.
"Four hundred thousand."
Nobody spoke.
I looked at Nick.
He was staring at his mother with an expression I had never seen on his face before.
Not anger.
Something quieter and more permanent than anger.
"You needed me to not get married," he said.
"I needed you to not make a mistake."
"Four hundred thousand dollars would have passed to me and Hannah jointly if we married."
"It would have passed to her." Susan's voice sharpened.
"The moment you signed that certificate, she would have had legal claim to half of it.
A woman you'd known for two years.
A woman who walked out the night before your accident."
"I went to my sister's house," I said.
"For two days."
"You left."
"We had an argument about the seating chart."
"It doesn't matter what it was about.
You left.
And I saw what that meant.
I saw exactly what kind of person you were."
"So you told me he was de@d." My voice was steady.
I was surprised by how steady it was.
"You decided, based on a two-day argument about a seating chart, that I wasn't good enough for your son.
And then you made a phone call and you took him away from me."
Susan looked at me without flinching.
"I protected my family's money."
"Susan." Richard's voice was low.
"Stop talking."
"She deserves to hear it."
"You've said enough."
"No." Nick stood up from the table.
"Let her finish.
I want to hear all of it." He crossed his arms.
"The messages you faked.
The funeral you told her not to come to.
The two months she spent grieving someone who was sitting in this house." He pointed at the ground.
"This house.
A few blocks away." He looked at his mother.
"Was any of it real?
The accident — was that real, or did you—"
"Of course the accident was real." For the first time, something cracked in Susan's voice.
"He almost di— He was in the ICU.
Do you think I wanted that?"
"I don't know what you wanted anymore."
"I wanted to protect you."
"From what?
From me?" I stepped forward.
"I loved him.
I had loved him for two years.
I had never once asked about his family's money.
I didn't even know about the account."
Susan looked at me.
"That's what you'd say."
"It's the truth."
"I had no way of knowing that."
"You could have asked." My voice finally broke on that word.
Just slightly.
"You could have talked to me.
You could have said, I'm worried about the money, I'm worried about your intentions, I need to understand who you are.
I would have answered every question you had.
Instead you picked up the phone and you told me the man I loved was de@d."
The word landed on the patio like something dropped from a height.
Susan looked away.
Richard stood up.
He walked to the back door and held it open.
"Nick," he said.
"Come inside.
Both of you." He glanced at Susan.
"You too.
We're not doing the rest of this out here."
Nick looked at me.
I still had the package in my hands.
Susan's name on the label.
I had carried it three blocks and it had led me here, to this patio, to this conversation, to the man I thought I had lost standing four feet away from me with two months of someone else's lies written across his face.
I set the package on the table.
"Okay," I said.
We went inside.
And that was when Nick's phone rang.
He looked at the screen.
His expression shifted in a way I couldn't read.
"It's my brother," he said.
May you like
Richard and Susan exchanged a look so fast I almost missed it.
Almost.
