Troublemakers Mess With the Wrong Girls novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Tea for Bernadette

Caleb stayed beside me on the stoop, and Dennis's wife sat down on the bottom step.

"I should have said something in April," she said. "I didn't, because I wanted the house."

"Say it now."

"When we closed, the bank asked for a second signature. Dennis wouldn't qualify on his own." She pulled the coat tighter. "So he asked your grandmother to put her house up behind the loan."

"Her house?"

"The one on Fairmount. She signed a stack of papers at our kitchen table. She thought they were birthday forms for the party."

I felt Caleb go still beside me.

"Does Grandma know she signed it?" I asked.

"Not what it was. She thinks Dennis is paying all of it." She wiped her face. "If he can't pay the four hundred thousand in thirty days, they take both houses."

"Both."

"Hers and ours." She looked up at me. "I know what I look like. I was filming on your father's money. I held the phone."

"You walked out on Saturday."

"I should have walked out in April."

I thought about my grandmother in her armchair, with her pearls and her good shoes and her Friday hair.

I hated her. I had good reasons.

But I also saw her in that big dining room alone at night, with no one left to boss around, and I didn't like how it felt in my chest.

"Why tell me?" I asked.

"Because Frank's the only one who ever sent my mother-in-law a card on her birthday that wasn't a lie." She stood. "Tell Maureen I'm sorry."

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