Chapter 7
The first day of the trial was chaos.
Cameras lined the steps of the courthouse.
Reporters shouted questions as we walked past.
My mother and brother arrived in a fancy black car, their lawyer flanking them.
She wore a simple black dress, her hair pulled back, her face pale.
She played the part of the heartbroken mother perfectly.
My brother wore a suit, his head down, looking like a lost little boy.
It was all an act.
And I knew it.
Inside the courtroom, the judge called the room to order.
The prosecution went first.
Mr. Tran laid out the evidence, one piece at a time.
The video from the bachelor party, showing my brother slipping a pill into my drink, then forging my signature on the transfer papers while I was unconscious on the couch.
The audio recordings my father had made, of my mother and brother planning the wedding humiliation, laughing about how easy it would be to break me.
The emails Minh had found, detailing their plan to have me committed and steal the entire estate.
The bank records showing the fifty million my mother had paid to the woman in the blue dress.
And finally, the woman herself took the stand.
She told the court everything.
How she’d worked for my grandfather.
How my mother had fired her.
How she’d been hired to pretend to be my mother.
How she’d recorded every word of the plan, because she’d known it was wrong.
She told the court about the notebook.
The judge asked to see it.
He read it in silence, his face softening as he turned the pages.
Then it was the defense’s turn.
Their lawyer tried to tear every witness apart.
He called my father a bitter, angry man who’d hated his wife for years and manipulated his own daughter to get revenge.
He called Minh a scorned woman who’d made up the emails to get back at her husband for leaving her.
He called the woman in the blue dress a thief and a liar who’d stolen the notebook and made up the whole story for a cut of the estate.
And when he put my mother on the stand?
She was brilliant.
She cried.
She sobbed.
She told the court she’d only ever wanted the best for me.
That I’d always been a troubled, angry child.
That I’d made up the adoption story myself, years ago, for attention.
That the wedding night? I’d grabbed the mic and said all those terrible things about myself, then paid the woman in the blue dress to go along with it, just to make her and my brother look bad.
“I loved her like she was my own,” she said, her voice breaking, for the whole court to hear. “I gave her twenty-eight years of my life. And this is how she repays me. With lies. With money. She took everything from us. Our home. Our son’s future. Our good name. I just want my daughter back. I just want my family back.”
Half the women in the jury were crying.
I felt sick.
She was lying through her teeth, and they were buying every word of it.
When the defense put my brother on the stand, he did the same thing.
Quiet.
Remorseful.
He said I’d always been jealous of him.
That I’d hated him for being the real son.
That I’d drugged myself and faked the video to frame him, just to get my hands on the grandfather’s money he’d always thought was his.
“I never wanted any of this,” he said, his voice trembling. “I just wanted my sister to love me. I just wanted us to be a family.”
By the end of the day, I was exhausted.
I walked out of the courthouse with my head down, the reporters shouting questions I couldn’t answer.
That night, I sat in the kitchen, staring at the wall.
“They’re going to get away with it,” I whispered.
My father put his hand on my shoulder.
“No,” he said. “They’re not. Tomorrow is your turn to testify. You tell them the truth. All of it. Let them see who you really are. That’s all you can do.”
Minh sat down next to me, putting her hand on my arm.
“He’s right,” she said. “You’re the strongest person I know. You’ve survived twenty-eight years of them. You can survive one more day on that stand. And when you’re done? The jury will see exactly who the liars are.”
I looked at them.
My father.
Minh.
My unborn niece.
The woman in the blue dress, who’d found the courage to tell the truth.
All the people who loved me, who believed in me.
May you like
I took a deep breath.
“Okay,” I said. “Tomorrow. I tell them everything.”
