Chapter 6 - THE FAMILY TAKES SIDES
Once Derek’s lawyer withdrew, the rest of the family stopped being able to treat this like messy private drama.
People chose.
My aunt Jill drove to Boston with clean clothes and grocery-store soup.
My cousin Megan offered to stay at my house in Hartford so it wouldn’t sit empty.
My uncle Raymond, who hadn’t spoken to Vanessa in three years over a business dispute, called just to say, “Your mother would be proud of you for not letting them touch that child’s future.”
Vanessa, meanwhile, was still trying to recruit sympathy.
She told people I had “always been jealous” of her and that Derek’s affair only happened because I “checked out emotionally” after Holly’s diagnosis. It was a grotesque lie, but a useful one if you needed to survive your own reflection.
Then Laura discovered something that made Vanessa’s role more concrete.
The witness line on the forged authorization wasn’t the only place her name appeared.
She had also emailed the bank from an account pretending to be Holly’s “maternal support contact,” stating that I was difficult to reach and that Derek should be copied on all urgent trust-related issues.
She was not just the affair partner.
She was part of the mechanism.
The practical consequences hit Derek next. His small landscaping company lost its line of credit after the bank flagged the fraud review. One of his equipment lessors filed a repossession notice. He began sending increasingly frantic messages about “working this out privately.”
No.
Private had protected him for too long.
At the hospital, Holly’s trial screening stretched on. Some numbers looked good. Some didn’t. We were waiting on final marrow results to see if she qualified for the treatment arm Dr. Greene wanted.
Hope, I learned, has a paperwork side too.
One evening, Calvin sat with me in the cafeteria while I pushed around a sandwich I couldn’t eat.
“There’s something you haven’t asked,” he said.
“What?”
“Why your mother set the trigger for releasing the file at interference with Holly’s care—not just the affair.”
I stared at him.
“Because she thought Derek would eventually want money more than secrecy.”
Calvin nodded.
“She believed betrayal would stay private until he got desperate.”
He was desperate now.
And the more desperate he became, the more one question pressed against everything else:
If he forged medical authority to get money, how far had he already inserted himself into Holly’s care before I caught him?
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The answer came the next morning when one of the Boston nurses asked why I had “reversed your earlier decision about trial consultation.”
I had made no earlier decision at all.
