Chapter 5 - Brooke's Version
Brooke Ansley agreed to meet me eleven days after the marina confrontation, in a coffee shop three blocks from Marcus's office, a location she'd chosen herself with what I initially assumed was strategic calculation but later understood was simply the closest place she could think of during an obviously panicked phone call.
She looked considerably less composed than she had on the Wanderlust, her hair pulled back hastily, dark circles visible beneath carefully applied concealer, her hands wrapped tightly around a coffee cup she didn't appear to be drinking.
"I need you to know," she said, before I'd even finished sitting down, "I didn't know about the life insurance money. I swear to you, I had no idea where the transfers were actually coming from."
"What did Marcus tell you they were?" I asked, keeping my voice carefully neutral, watching her closely.
"He said it was from his savings," Brooke said. "He told me he'd been putting money aside separately for months, that it was his own money, meant for us eventually, once he'd worked out how to leave his marriage properly. I know how that sounds now. I know I should have asked more questions. But he was very convincing, and I wanted to believe him."
I studied her for a long moment, trying to determine how much of this account represented genuine deception on her part versus a carefully rehearsed narrative designed to minimize her own culpability now that the scheme had unraveled.
"What about the boat?" I asked. "The summer authorization, transferring the account into your name?"
Brooke's face flushed. "He told me your father had actually wanted the boat to eventually pass to whoever Marcus ended up with, since your dad supposedly thought Marcus needed 'a project' to keep him grounded. He said you'd stopped using the boat entirely since your father died, that it was just sitting there wasting away, and that it made more sense for someone to actually enjoy it."
The audacity of this particular lie momentarily stole my breath — not simply that Marcus had fabricated an entire narrative about my father's supposed wishes, but that he'd done so specifically to make his mistress feel entitled to something that had never, for one moment, belonged to either of them.
"My father built that boat with his own hands over twenty years," I said quietly. "He left it to me specifically, in a will he revised eight months before he died, because it was the one thing he wanted to make absolutely certain stayed in the family. He never met you. He never discussed you. Everything Marcus told you about my father's wishes was invented."
Brooke's composure cracked slightly, tears gathering that she blinked back with visible effort. "I didn't know," she said again, quieter now. "I want you to believe that, even though I understand why you might not. I knew Marcus was married. I'm not going to pretend I didn't understand that part was wrong. But I genuinely believed the money was his own, and I genuinely believed the boat situation had been discussed and approved by your family somehow. I feel like an idiot saying that out loud now."
"Why are you telling me this?" I asked. "What do you actually want from this conversation?"
Brooke was quiet for a long moment, turning her coffee cup slowly in her hands. "Marcus called me three days ago," she said finally. "After you filed for divorce. He told me I needed to say, if anyone asked, that the money transfers were gifts I'd requested, not something he'd initiated. He wanted me to help him build a story where I'd pressured him into it, so it would look less premeditated on his end if this ever went to court."
Something cold settled into my chest, distinct from anything I'd felt at the marina or in Renata's office. "He asked you to lie for him."
"He's asked me to lie for him about several things now," Brooke said, meeting my eyes directly for the first time since we'd sat down. "And I keep thinking about what you said just now, about your father building that boat over twenty years, about it meaning something real that Marcus tried to erase and replace with a story that made it sound like it was always meant to be mine. I think that's exactly what he's been doing to me too, honestly. Building a story that made everything sound reasonable and inevitable, so I wouldn't ask the questions I probably should have been asking from the beginning."
"Will you put that in writing?" I asked. "What you just told me, about the phone call, about him asking you to lie?"
May you like
Brooke hesitated, visibly weighing the personal cost of what I was asking against whatever loyalty, however diminished, she still felt toward Marcus.
"Yes," she said finally. "I'll write it all down. I think I need to, actually, for my own sake as much as yours. I don't want to keep being someone who helps him rewrite reality every time it becomes inconvenient."
