She reached the photographs of Robert with Valerie. She stared at them for a long time. In one, they were kissing at the entrance of a restaurant. In another, he was putting a necklace on her. In another, they were entering an apartment building together.
“Do you recognize this building?” I said. “It’s six blocks from your house.”
A tear fell onto the photograph.
“How long?” she asked with a broken voice.
“Two years.”
“And me? I gave him everything. All the money you sent me. I transferred it to the company to help them, to save them.”
“I know. It’s in the documents. All the transfers. Every cent I sent you went directly to that phantom company. And he used it to keep his mistress.”
She doubled over as if she had been punched in the stomach.
“I’m an idiot.”
“No, you are not an idiot. You are a woman who loved someone too much who didn’t deserve it.”
“I sacrificed everything. My career, my dignity, my life. And for what? For him to cheat on me. For his mother to treat me like trash. To live in a house that isn’t even theirs.”
“No more,” I said firmly. “No more, Brenda.”
She looked at me with those red, swollen eyes.
“What can I do? I don’t have any money. I don’t have a job. I have nothing.”
“You have your mother. And that’s more than they have.”
“I don’t understand.”
I pulled another envelope from my bag. Inside were the property deeds—the house, the company, everything.
“I bought their debts,” I said. “All of them. The house is in my name now. The company too. They are mine.”
Brenda stared at me, not comprehending.
“What?”
“I spent all my savings, every cent I earned in New York. But I did it. I bought everything they think is theirs.”
“But… but that means…”
“It means I can do whatever I want with those properties. And what I want is to give them to you.”
“To me?”
“You are my daughter. Everything I have is yours. It always has been.”
She stared at the documents, unable to process what she was seeing.
“Why? Why did you do this?”
“Because you are my daughter. Because I love you. Because I will not let that family continue to destroy you.”
“But you lost all your money.”
“Money can be recovered. You cannot. If I had lost you, if you had stayed in that house for a year longer, two years longer, I don’t know if there would have been anything left of you to save.”
She hugged me tight, like when she was a little girl and had nightmares and I was the only one who could chase them away.
“Thank you, Mommy,” she sobbed. “Thank you.”
I held her while she cried. Years of stored-up tears, years of swallowed humiliation, years of broken silence.
When she finally pulled away, her face was soaked, but her eyes were different. There was something there that I hadn’t seen in days, something I thought had disappeared forever.
There was fury.
