“He lied.”
“Yes.”
“And they believed him?”
“They believed the lifestyle. They believed the address. They believed your last name.”
I laughed once, without humor.
The boy had built a castle out of borrowed mirrors and called himself king.
Now the mirrors were breaking.
My phone buzzed again.
Brandon.
I didn’t answer.
It buzzed again.
Amber.
Then a number I didn’t recognize.
Martin watched me. “Don’t pick up unknown calls.”
I turned the phone face down.
For the first time that morning, I felt something like grief.
Not for the house. Not for the money. I had lost money before, made it again, lost more, lived through it. Money was a tool. A shelter. A weapon, sometimes. But it was never blood.
I grieved the small boy who used to fall asleep in my truck after visiting job sites, boots dusty, cheek pressed against the seat belt. I grieved the teenager who stopped talking after his mother died, then learned that expensive things made silence feel less lonely. I grieved my own failures too, because a father never gets to stand outside the wreckage and claim he had no part in building the road there.
