The four months before the trial were the strangest of my life. Lily's treatment entered the maintenance phase — less intense chemo, more time at home, her hair starting to grow back in soft patches. We moved back to our house in Murfreesboro, and for the first time in half a year, I slept in my own bed. I kept waking up at 3 a.m., reaching for a hospital recliner that wasn't there.
The business was a ghost. Southern Bloom Events had no equipment, no operating cash, a fraudulently obtained second mortgage being unwound, and a reputation in tatters — half the town had seen the gala video. Vendors wouldn't return my calls. Clients asked for refunds on deposits Dana had already spent. I spent my mornings on the phone with Rachel, my afternoons with Howard reconciling what was left, and my evenings helping Lily with homework she'd missed.
Bethany showed up every Saturday with groceries and refused to leave until I'd eaten a real meal. "You're no good to anyone if you collapse," she said, shoving a casserole into my oven.
Tom moved into a rental across town with the kids. He came by on Sundays, quiet and hollow-eyed, helping me fix things around the house that Dana's chaos had left broken — a leaking faucet, a dead outlet, the fence gate that wouldn't close. We didn't talk about Dana. We talked about the kids' grades, Lily's counts, the Titans' chances. It was the most honest our relationship had been in years, built on the ruins of everything else.
"Do you think she loved us?" Tom asked one Sunday, out of nowhere, while he was fixing the gate. "Ever?"
I thought about it. "I think Dana loves Dana. The rest of us were — props. Supporting characters." I handed him a wrench. "I'm sorry. I know that's not what you want to hear."
"It's the truth. I need the truth now." He tightened the bolt. "The kids ask about her. I tell them she's facing consequences for bad choices. The twelve-year-old — she looked it up online. She knows everything."
"How's she handling it?"
"She asked me if her mom ever loved her, or if she was just pretending." Tom's voice broke. "What do I say to that, Megan?"
I didn't have an answer. I put my hand on my brother's shoulder, and we stood there in the yard while Lily and the kids played on the swing set, laughing like children are supposed to laugh, and I thought about how Dana had stolen that sound from her own family.
The trial prep was grueling. Rachel and the prosecutors — the case was being tried jointly by the DA's office and the U.S. Attorney — walked me through my testimony four times. "They're going to try to rattle you," the federal prosecutor, a woman named Diane Park, told me. "Dana's attorney will suggest you were negligent, that you abandoned the business, that you signed things and forgot. Stay calm. Stick to the facts. Let the evidence speak."
"What evidence bothers you most?" I asked.
Diane smiled. "The lunch tape. Juries love a confession in the defendant's own voice. And the bank footage — Dana smiling into the camera while she forges your name. That's the image they'll take into deliberation."
Two weeks before the trial, I got a letter. Handwritten, on lined paper, from the federal holding facility. Dana's looping handwriting.
"Megan — I know you hate me. You have every right. But I'm begging you as a mother — my kids need me. If you ask the prosecutors to go easy, if you tell them I've suffered enough, maybe they'll listen. You're the victim. You have the power. Please. For the kids. — Dana"
I read it three times. Then I called Rachel. "Dana wrote me a letter. She's asking me to ask for leniency. For the kids."
"What do you want to do?"
I thought about Lily's hospital room. The $412 balance. The emerald dress. The oncology floor at 6:40 a.m.
"I want to do what's right," I said. "And what's right is letting the jury decide. She didn't show me mercy when she used my daughter's cancer to steal. I'm not going to manufacture mercy she never earned."
"Then we don't respond," Rachel said. "We let the letter sit. And Megan — save it. The prosecutors will want to see it."
I put the letter in the file with everything else. Evidence item number forty-two.
The night before the trial, Lily crawled into my bed — she was ten now, her birthday had come and gone in a blur of hospital visits — and said, "Mommy, are you scared about tomorrow?"
"A little," I admitted.
"Dr. Patel says being scared is okay as long as you do the brave thing anyway."
I held her close, breathing in the smell of her new hair, and thought: out of everyone in this story, the nine-year-old with leukemia was the braviest person I knew.
"Your doctor's pretty smart," I said.
"I know," Lily said, already half asleep. "I told her you were brave too."
