Without the house and without Mitchell quietly subsidizing their entire life, Suzanne and Philip moved into a cramped two-bedroom apartment in a less polished part of town. The neighborhood was safe enough but unremarkable, the parking tight, the walls thin, the kind of place Suzanne would once have described with pursed lips and words like temporary or not ideal. Cheryl moved in with them because she could no longer maintain her lifestyle independently. The black SUV was repossessed exactly as Mitchell had said it would be.
A friend of a friend texted Wendy a video clip the day it happened. Cheryl stood on a sidewalk in leggings and oversized sunglasses, screaming at a tow operator while balancing her baby on one hip and filming with the other hand. “You can’t just take it!” she shouted.
The operator, to his credit, sounded almost bored. “Ma’am, I absolutely can.”
The clip ended before the funniest part, which Wendy later learned from Marcus: Cheryl tried to claim the vehicle contained “medical necessities,” and when asked to identify them, named a curling wand and a cosmetic cooler.