Chapter 6 - Kayla's — I Mean, Brooke's — UnravelingI hadn't expected Brooke to call me. I certainly hadn't expected her to call crying.
It was eleven days after the marina, three days after Patricia's office formally sent a cease-and-desist regarding the unauthorized use of the Wanderlust and the estate funds, and I was sorting through my father's old sailing logs when my phone rang with a number I didn't recognize.
"Diane?" Her voice was smaller than I remembered it, none of the confidence I'd watched her wear like a costume on my father's boat. "It's Brooke. Please don't hang up."
I almost did anyway. But something — curiosity, or maybe just the exhaustion of holding onto anger without any new information to feed it — made me stay on the line.
"What do you want, Brooke?"
"I didn't know," she said, the words tumbling out fast, like she'd been rehearsing them and was afraid she'd lose her nerve before finishing. "About the money. About the line of credit. He told me the boat was — he told me it was basically his, that your father had left it to both of you, that you didn't care about it anymore because it was too painful, that letting me use it for the Instagram thing was actually helping you avoid dealing with it."
"And you believed all of that."
"I wanted to," she said, and there was something almost pathetic in the honesty of it. "He's very good at making things sound reasonable, Diane. I don't know if you know that about him or if you're just used to it by now."
"I'm learning," I said flatly.
"The invoices," she continued, "the ones from my consulting company — he told me those were legitimate business expenses, that he was paying me out of a marketing budget that existed for exactly that purpose. I didn't know it was coming out of an estate account. I didn't know it was your dead father's money. I would never have—" Her voice broke. "I know that doesn't make it better. I know I still should have asked more questions. I know I still did something awful, being with a married man in the first place, and I'm not calling to ask you to forgive that part. I'm calling because I think you should know he's already telling people a different story."
My skin went cold. "What story?"
"That you're unstable. That you've been 'erratic' since your father died, that you're the one who's been financially reckless, that he's worried you're going to do something drastic with the estate and he's just trying to protect it — protect the boat, protect Mia's inheritance — from your, quote, 'grief spiral.'"
I sat down slowly on the edge of my father's old desk, feeling the floor tilt slightly beneath me in a way that had nothing to do with the boat.
"Who is he telling this to?"
"His mother. Some of his business partners. I think — Diane, I think he's building a case. Like, an actual legal case. In case you go after him for the money."
I closed my eyes. Of course he was. Of course a man who had spent eight months quietly building a fraudulent charter business behind my back had the foresight to also build himself an alibi, one narrative ready before I'd even finished discovering the first.
"Why are you telling me this?" I asked. "You don't owe me anything. You could just disappear and let this be my problem to untangle."
There was a long pause on the line. "Because I found the messages," Brooke said finally, her voice dropping lower. "On his laptop, when I was at his office last week. There's another woman, Diane. Before me. Someone named Carla, from two years ago. He did something very similar to her — a 'business investment,' money that went missing from a project she trusted him with. I looked her up. She's real. She's on LinkedIn. I think — I think you should talk to her."
The room felt very quiet.
"Send me what you have," I said. "Everything. The messages, the name, whatever else you found."
"I will," Brooke said. "And Diane — for what it's worth, and I know it's worth very little — I'm sorry about your father's boat. I didn't understand what it meant. I do now."
May you like
I hung up the phone and sat very still for a long time, watching the afternoon light shift across my father's old sailing logs, understanding that the thread Patricia had warned me about pulling had just led me somewhere much larger than a forged signature and an unauthorized champagne party.
It had led me to a pattern. And patterns, unlike accidents, could be proven.
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