“She stole my phone and sent those messages to frame me!”

“For ten months?” I asked.

“She stole your phone every single week to text about the money I sent you?”

“Yes!” Megan cried, her voice cracking.

“She was jealous of me too! Everyone is jealous of me!”

My hands began to shake slightly, so I set the phone down on the laminate coffee table.

The blue light of the screen reflected off the white paper of the deed transfer documents.

Those documents lay right next to my coffee mug.

“You told me she was in a clinic in Columbus,” I said, looking at my mother.

My mother didn’t look at the phone.

She kept her eyes fixed on me, her lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line.

Her fingers were wrapped tightly around the strap of her purse.

“You don’t understand how difficult her life is,” my mother said.

“She is fragile.”

“She has twenty-four thousand dollars of our money in a secret account, Mom,” I said.

“And she’s been dancing in heels at the Flat Iron Cafe while I’ve been rewiring old warehouses at four in the morning to pay off this place.”