Aunt Martha stood up and tapped her glass, giving a speech about family unity and how much my parents loved me. It was the cue they had written for me, so I stood up and walked to the front of the room with my briefcase. I thanked her for her words and told the room that because family mattered, the truth was the most important thing we had.
I turned on the projector and showed the first slide, which was the timeline of the funeral versus the Hawaii vacation post. A murmur went through the room as people saw the grinning photos of my family at a pool while I was at a graveyard. I showed the screenshot of my mother calling the funeral dreary and the lilies cheap, and someone in the room actually gasped.
“My parents asked me for fifty thousand dollars for a sports bar two weeks after the funeral,” I told the silent room.
Tyler barked that I was a liar, but he sat back down when I asked if he wanted me to keep going with the evidence. I showed the public records of his business debts and the documents proving I had built my own company with a bank loan. I read my mother’s Facebook post aloud, specifically the part about me being a daughter before a captain.