My parents missed the funeral of my husband and both our kids to sing happy birthday to my sister.

I called the number back. It rang twice before a woman answered.

"Who is this?" I asked.

"My name's Rhonda. I'm a paralegal at Vale's firm." Her voice was low and careful. "I shouldn't be calling you. I want you to know I know that."

"Then why are you?"

A pause. "Because I have a sister too. And because what's going on in that office is wrong."

I stepped into a doorway off the sidewalk, out of the foot traffic.

"What is Vivian telling them?"

"She's giving a statement. About your marriage. About Marcus." Another pause. "She's claiming he pulled away from your whole family the last two years. That you controlled who he saw and talked to. That he told her once, privately, that he felt isolated and trapped."

The cold sank straight into my chest.

"That's a lie."

"I know. I've read the whole file. The timeline doesn't hold together. But her statement gives them a living witness — somebody who actually knew him. That's the piece they were missing."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because she came back in yesterday and added something new." Rhonda's voice dropped further. "She's now saying Marcus called her three weeks before the accident. That he told her he was thinking about changing the estate plan. That he had concerns about you."

I pressed my back against the wall.

"That never happened."

"I believe you. But right now it's her word against a d*ad man's." A short silence. "Your attorney needs to get the phone records. If that call happened, it'll be right there. If it didn't —"

"It didn't."

"Then the records prove that too." One last pause. "I have to go."

The line went d*ad.

I stood in that doorway for a full minute. A woman shoved past me with a stroller. A delivery truck idled at the curb. The whole world just kept moving.

I called Harold.

"I need Marcus's phone records," I said the second he picked up. "Every call he made in the last six months of his life. And I need them before Vale can request them first."

"What happened?"

I told him all of it.

He was quiet for three seconds. "I'll file the request this afternoon. Cora — if Vivian invented that call —"

"She did."

"Then we have them." His voice was flat and certain. "Lying in a signed statement in a civil matter carries real consequences. Not slap-on-the-wrist consequences."

"I know."

"Are you all right?"

I thought about Vivian at a birthday dinner while three coffins waited in a church. Vivian calling to tell me she never knew what to say. Vivian sitting in a law office twice in one week, carefully constructing a phone call that never took place, to take a d*ad man's money out of his widow's hands.

"I'm fine," I said. "Get the records."

I went home and sat at the table with a legal pad and wrote down every memory I had of Marcus's last six months. Every dinner, every weekend, every call I'd watched him make or take. The friends he'd seen. The work events. The Saturday he took Isla to her gymnastics meet and came home with a video of her falling off the beam and laughing so hard she couldn't stand back up.

He hadn't been isolated. He'd been alive. I wrote until my hand cramped.

Two days later, Harold called.

"The records are in."

"And?"

"There is no call from Marcus to Vivian anywhere in the last six months of his life. Not one. The last time they spoke was fourteen months before the accident. It lasted four minutes."

I shut my eyes. "She lied."

"She lied in a signed statement," Harold said. "That's a whole different thing." A pause. "I've drafted a letter to Vale. I'm giving him twenty-four hours to withdraw Vivian's statement voluntarily before I take the next step."

"What's the next step?"

"I report it to the North Carolina State Bar, I file a motion for sanctions, and I make sure any judge who ever touches this case knows exactly what your father's witness tried to pull."