He agreed. I didn't know yet if I believed he'd follow through.
Vanessa took a different approach entirely. She showed up at Diane's house two days later — I still don't know how she found the address — dressed like she was headed to a luncheon, a folder of her own tucked under one arm, her smile arranged like something she'd rehearsed in a mirror.
"I think we got off on the wrong foot," she said when I opened the door, Diane standing behind me with her arms crossed like a bouncer. "I want to talk about how we move forward as a family. Especially now, with your... windfall."
"There's no 'we,'" I said. "There's a police investigation, Vanessa. Detective Ruiz would love to hear anything you'd like to add to it."
Her smile thinned but held. "Margaret, be reasonable. Whatever you think you heard—"
"I have it recorded," I said. "Clearly. Your voice, admitting to falsified income figures, an inflated appraisal, and a plan to use a forged power of attorney if I 'became difficult.' I've already given a copy to my lawyer and to the police. So no, I don't think I misheard anything. I think I heard exactly what you meant for me never to hear."
For the first time, the mask slipped all the way. Something ugly and impatient surfaced in her eyes.
"You have no idea what real pressure looks like," she snapped. "Marcus is already exposed on two other files. If this collapses, it's not just me who goes down. It's Ryan too — his name is on emails, his signature is on the insurance request. You want to watch your son go to prison over a house you were never even going to use the equity in?"
There it was. Not an apology. A threat dressed up as concern for my son, the same trick she'd used on him for six months, wearing my love for Ryan like a weapon she thought she could still point at me.
"I think," I said, very quietly, "you should leave before I call Detective Ruiz and tell him you came here to intimidate a witness in an active fraud investigation."
She left. But not before she said one more thing over her shoulder, something that would matter more than I understood in that moment.
"Ask your son what happened to his father's watch," she said. "Ask him where the money from that actually went."
Then she was gone, and I stood in Diane's doorway with a cold feeling spreading through my chest that had nothing to do with the mortgage fraud at all.
Thomas's watch. A gold Hamilton he'd worn every day of our marriage, the one thing of his I had given to Ryan the week after the funeral, telling him it was meant to be passed down, father to son, the way Thomas's own father had passed it to him. I hadn't seen Ryan wear it in over a year. I'd assumed it was being serviced, or that he was saving it for a special occasion, or a hundred other harmless explanations I'd never bothered to actually ask about because some part of me hadn't wanted to know if the truth was smaller than the excuses.
