I sat down. My hands were not shaking. My pulse was steady. I felt the way you feel at the end of something that required everything you had to complete, emptied out but clear, every decision made, every step taken, nothing left uncertain or undone.
In the hallway afterward, Aunt Colette approached me crying. She said she hadn’t known, that Diane had told them, that she had believed. I understood. I was not angry with Colette. Narcissists do not confine their manipulation to their primary target. They build an alternative reality comprehensive enough to trap the people around them, good people who trust what they are told and have no particular reason to doubt the person doing the telling.
She asked why I hadn’t come to her. Why I hadn’t told anyone what was happening.
“Because I needed you to believe her,” I said. “If any of you had doubted her story, she would have changed her approach. She needed a full audience in that courtroom, people who had been nodding along for months. She needed that confidence, because that confidence was the only thing that would make her go through with the petition. And the petition was the only way to get the forgery into the court record under oath, where it becomes a felony instead of a private dispute I have to prove in civil court.”
Colette stared at me.
