Molly was struggling without Mark, without her mother’s endless river of cash, which her new lawyer had likely frozen. She was adrift. I found her working as a hostess at a local chain restaurant, a place my mother would have considered beneath them.
I sat at a table in her section. When she saw me, she nearly dropped her tray of water glasses.
“What are you doing here, Caroline?” she hissed.
“We need to talk,” I said. “When’s your break?”
Ten minutes later, we were sitting in her car, the pink convertible, which now had a long spiderweb crack in the windshield.
“If you’re here to gloat, just get it over with,” she muttered, refusing to look at me.
“I’m not. I’m here to give you a choice, Molly.”
I laid a single piece of paper on her dashboard. It was the incorporation document for Molly’s Lifestyle LLC, listing her as CEO and our mother as the financial agent.
“What is this?” she asked.
“That’s your business. The one Mom funded by illegally selling $80,000 of Grandpa’s stocks.”
Her head snapped up. “What? No. Mom… Mom gave me a loan. She said it was an investment from her own savings.”
“She lied, Molly. It was Grandpa’s. All of it. The car, the clothes, the trips. You’ve been living on stolen money.”
She stared at the paper, the dots connecting with painful slowness. I could see the exact moment her world fractured.
“The car… But she said…”
“Mom is going to lose this case. Molly, the cabin is mine. That’s a fact. But the other thing, the theft? That’s a criminal matter. The judge is going to refer this to the district attorney. She is going to be charged. She is probably going to jail.”
Molly started to cry, not her usual dramatic sobs, but small, terrified hiccuping sounds.
“Jail? Like, jail jail?”
“Yes. And as the sole beneficiary of Molly’s Lifestyle LLC, you are a co-conspirator. You are, at best, an accessory to her crimes. They will come for you, too.”
“But I didn’t know,” she wailed. “I didn’t know where the money came from. I swear.”
“That’s what you’ll have to tell them,” I said, my voice softening for the first time. “Molly, I’m here to offer you a way out. One way. You have to break from her. You have to tell the truth. You have to testify.”
“Testify against Mom?”
“Testify for yourself. You can be a victim in this, or you can be a defendant. Mom used you. She used your ambition, and she used your willingness not to ask questions. She built you a fantasy life with stolen money, and she’s going to let you take the fall with her.”
I reached into my bag and pulled out a business card.
“This is Miss Alani’s card. And this,” I handed her a second one, “is the card of a criminal-defense lawyer. He’s good, and he’s expecting your call. You have until the trial date, which is in one week. You can either walk into that courtroom with our mother, or you can walk in and sit behind me.”
I got out of the car.
“Caroline,” she called, her voice small.
I turned.
“Did you… did you know about this all along?”