Chapter 6 - The Confession
My mother lay pinned against the cold floor, her chest heaving as the guards secured handcuffs around her wrists.
She did not look at the guards.
She looked directly at me, her eyes wide with a frantic, desperate kind of terror.
"Mom?" I whispered, my voice breaking under the weight of the impossible reality.
"I had to do it, Camille," she sobbed, tears cutting paths through the sterile powder on her face.
"What do you mean you had to do it?" I screamed, stepping away from the bed.
"You just tried to murder your own granddaughter!"
The police arrived moments later, pulling her to her feet and reading her Miranda rights.
I demanded the officers give me one minute alone with her before they dragged her to a cell.
The lead detective, a man who knew Nolan well, reluctantly agreed and stepped out into the hallway.
I grabbed my mother by the collar of her fake scrubs.
"Explain this to me right now, or I swear to God I will let you rot in prison forever," I hissed.
"Sabrina forced me," my mother wept, shaking uncontrollably.
"She found out about the money your father and I embezzled from the company pension fund."
"She said if I didn't finish what the poisoned lemonade started, she would send us both to federal prison."
My head spun with the sheer volume of lies my family had been keeping from me.
"And Nolan?" I demanded.
"Is he in on this too?"
My mother let out a bitter, agonizing laugh that sounded like scraping metal.
"Nolan doesn't care about the money, Camille."
"Nolan just wants to watch you suffer for what you did in Seattle five years ago."
My heart stopped dead in my chest.
Seattle.
The corporate fraud case I had investigated right before I met Nolan.
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The case where my testimony put a young, corrupt executive in prison, where he later hung himself in his cell.
"That executive was Nolan's younger brother," my mother whispered right before the police walked back in.
