Home For The Holidays

When my brother questioned me in the beginning about my sudden change in attitude towards him and her, I told him as much of the truth as I was willing to share. “The more I learn about this situation, the less I agree with your choices. You’re an adult, and so am I, but my parents raised us both to have higher moral standards, and I can’t in good faith support you and the woman who destroyed the childhood of my nieces.”

He was not pleased, to say the least, but at the time and even now, I won’t budge from my stance until he comes to his senses. Those two little girls are my blood; there’s no way I will allow him or the flying monkey to hurt them any more than they already have. I had no doubt that they were his, as well as mom and dad. You only have to see a picture of me at their age to see the similarities. Whatever drug that banshee was feeding him must be some good shit because my brother is not the man I know and love. Stupid was never one of the words I used to describe him in the past, not until she came along.

For the next semester, after I went back to college, I concentrated on finding Troy the slime bucket. It was easy enough catching his interest. I found him on a dating app, and although we lived so far away from each other, it was easy to catfish his dumb ass and get him to meet me on one of my weekends home. In fact, I’d gone home specifically to see him.

Of course, he thought I was interested in sleeping with him since he had no idea who I was. I just needed to clone his phone, but since I didn’t have any of his information, I needed to get up close and personal for that. I buttered him up like a butterball at Thanksgiving, saying all the things a Don Juan wanna be like him would like to hear, then played the ‘oh no, my phone just died may I borrow yours’ card.

He fell for it since by then I’d lulled him into a false sense of thinking that his infantile lines were actually working. Once he’d given me the phone and I got what I needed, I pretended to call mom before excusing myself to the bathroom. I headed in that direction, but since I’d made sure to get to the meeting spot first and made sure I was the one facing the door, he had no idea when I changed course and headed for the exit.

I hopped into my Cruiser and eased out of the parking lot since I didn’t want him to by any chance glance out the window and see me leaving. I went back home, erased my profile on the dating app, and scrubbed everything clean. I’d used a fake name, of course, so it didn’t matter, and the dark wig I’d worn with the mole on my chin had taken care of the rest.

It was going to take a few days for the henna tattoo on my neck to disappear, though, but a little makeup should take care of that until I head back to school. It was only later when I told Jared the lengths I’d gone to, that he taught me a neat little trick that he and the geek squad uses to get information without having to leave the sanctity of their home. It’s always the quiet ones, but again, I’m getting ahead of myself.

With Troy’s phone now in my control, I had access to all of his social media as well as his email. I wasn’t expecting to find much because it had been more than a year since the set up by this point, after all. But I’d overestimated the ignorance of someone with less than half a brain cell, which he obviously shared with about ten other people.

I found the conversation in his deleted files, along with the blackmail messages he’d been sending Tessa that pretty much showed her paying him off to keep him quiet after he realized what her little set up had been about. To give him credit, he hadn’t been in on it from the beginning.

She’d sold him some story about Deidre still being in love with him and realizing that she’d made a mistake marrying Tom. At the restaurant, it was she who sent him after Deidre and told him he should kiss her to see that the spark was still there. It was only after Deidre had rebuffed him that he started to see the light.

Then I saw his messages to Tessa, balling her out for giving him wrong information, and then months later, when the split between my brother and his wife happened, he put two and two together when Deidre contacted him about the picture and started blackmailing Tessa from then on.