My hands were shaking when I set down the phone, not from sadness this time. Rage. Clean and bright. Because somewhere under everything else—under the legal case, under the exhaustion, under the old grief—there was this fresh realization that they all still thought they could tell me what my own life meant. What my grandmother meant. What family meant.
By the end of June, Claudette had the bank subpoenas.
The paper trail was about to turn from suspicious to devastating.
And though I didn’t know it yet, someone much closer to Colette than any of us was beginning to notice the same thing.
Within weeks, a man who spent most of his life on the road would walk into my kitchen carrying proof my mother could not explain away.
Part 5
July came in hot enough to blur the edges of the city.
By ten in the morning the air above the pavement was already wobbling. My front porch railing felt hot under my palm. The basil leaves in their pot looked offended by noon. Baton Rouge in summer smells like wet concrete, cut grass, fryer oil drifting from strip malls, and that deep green rot from ditches holding too much water. Heat changes people. Tempers rise faster. Secrets ferment.
Claudette’s call came on the last Friday in June, just before lunch.
“The subpoenaed bank records are in,” she said.
I shut my office door though I lived alone, as if privacy were suddenly a thing I could create by force. On my second monitor a patient chart glowed open, abandoned mid-code.
“Tell me.”
Her voice stayed even, but I could hear the charge under it. “The estate funds were deposited into the joint account held by Francine Pierre and Colette Pierre Landry between February and May of 2020. Roughly ninety-five thousand dollars was transferred directly to Colette. Approximately thirty-five thousand was used to satisfy a car loan associated with Renard Pierre.”
My father’s car. White Buick. Paid off with my grandmother’s money.
“And the rest?” I asked.
“A significant portion appears to have gone toward your parents’ mortgage, home improvements, retail purchases, and travel expenses. We’re still tracing specifics, but Martha—there’s no ambiguity anymore.”
I sat back in my chair and looked through the blinds into my backyard. Sunlight hammered the fence. The wind spinner clicked without breeze because the fan in my open window nudged it. No ambiguity anymore.
I had spent years swimming in ambiguity. Maybe Mom didn’t mean it like that. Maybe Colette was just immature. Maybe Dad avoided conflict because that was easier than choosing. Ambiguity had been the family’s native language. It let everybody keep their hands clean while I stood there bleeding quietly.
