All Chapters of Mr Ex, Call me your uncle's wife now.: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

The cafe Sophie picked was the kind of place that felt designed to make difficult conversations easier… tucked into a side street off the main avenue, all warm wood and low lamps and a long window that let in the gray afternoon light. There were six other people in the room and none of them were paying attention to us. That was the point. Sophie had chosen well.I got there first. I ordered a coffee. I sat with my back to the wall and my hands wrapped around the cup and watched the door.Nathan came in at four minutes past three.He came in alone, which surprised me… I'd expected Sophie to arrive with him. He was wearing a dark coat and his hair was pushed back off his forehead and he looked at me across the room and something in his face shifted… not quite a smile, not quite anything… and then he walked over and sat down across from me."Hey," he said."Hey."He shrugged out of his coat and hung it on the back of his chair. A server appeared and he ordered a black coffee without loo

The conference room on the twenty-second floor smelled like new carpet and old coffee, and the table was covered in paper.Not the neat, organized kind of paper people put in folders and tabbed binders. This was the other kind. The kind that came in banker's boxes and got spread out across six feet of polished wood in overlapping strata, the kind you had to walk around because you couldn't see the table anymore. Bank statements. Property records. Wire transfer confirmations. A photograph of my father's signature beside another photograph of the same signature on a document he'd never seen. Three years of my mother's medical records, printed and highlighted and flagged in yellow.I stood at the head of the table with my hands flat on the wood and looked down at all of it."This is everything," I said."This is everything we could get our hands on legally," Marcus corrected. He was sitting at the far end of the table with his shirtsleeves rolled up and his glasses pushed back on his he

"Then you'll recall that the amendment changed the distribution date from the plaintiff's twenty-fifth birthday to the trustee's discretion.""I… yes. I recall that.""And you'll recall that it added a clause allowing the trustee to reallocate assets for the benefit of the family unit.""Yes.""And you'll recall that it named you as trustee.""I…" Sandra's mouth opened and closed. "Yes.""So you read a document that gave you complete control over your stepdaughter's inheritance, and you signed it, and you never once mentioned it to your stepdaughter, and you moved every asset in the trust into your own name within forty-eight hours, and you'd like this jury to believe that you did all of that by accident?"Sandra's face went white."I didn't…" she started."Thank you, Mrs. Sandra. No further questions."Megan took the stand on the third day.She was quieter than her mother. She answered the questions in a small voice and looked at her hands and said she hadn't known where the properti

The county jail was a low brick building on the north side of the city, and the interview room was a concrete box with a metal table bolted to the floor and two chairs and a camera in the corner. I sat down across from Sandra and put my hands on the table and waited.She was wearing an orange jumpsuit. Her hair was flat and her face was bare and she looked smaller than she'd looked in the courtroom, older, the pearls gone and the suit gone and the practiced smile gone. But her eyes were the same. Sharp and bright and watching."You came," she said."You said you'd talk to me.""I said I'd talk to you if you came alone." She glanced at the camera. "And you did as I said, good girl.""What do you want, Sandra?"She smiled. It was not a nice smile."I want you to understand something," she said. "I've been in this family for years. I've been cleaning up your father's messes for fourteen years. I've been wiping your mother's mouth and paying her bills and keeping the house running while y

"The point is that I've been trying to get close to you for a while now." His voice cracked. "The point is that I've been trying to break down the walls I've built around me, I thought we were getting somewhere. I thought you were starting to trust me. And then I find out that the biggest thing in your life, find out about it from Sandra.” He laughed. It was not a nice laugh. "Do you have any idea what that feels like? Do you have any idea what it feels like to realize that the woman you love trusts her stepmother's cruelty more than she trusts you?"I froze at the mention of those words. “Woman you love?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”“Nothing,” he said, looking away. “It doesn't matter now.”"That's not fair.""None of this is fair." Oh now you stand here and talk about what is fair and what isn't? Really? I thought I knew you enough, I thought I was beginning to understand you. But now it's as clear as day, I don't know who you are.""You know who I am.""Do I?" He turne