Her eyes flicked past me toward the staircase. “Wake Aaron. Wake Lucy. Bring documents if you can. Ten minutes.”
By then Aaron had come into the hallway, one hand on the banister, still groggy and already annoyed. “Denise, what the hell is this?”
She turned to him. “Your brother is on his way here, and he isn’t coming alone.”
That woke him.
Aaron’s older brother, Caleb, had been circling our lives for months under the guise of family concern. Ever since Aaron refused to co-sign a business loan for Caleb’s third “fresh start,” the calls had turned uglier. Then came the guilt from Aaron’s mother, Evelyn, who believed the older son’s failures were temporary and the younger son’s boundaries were betrayal. Two weeks earlier, Evelyn had shown up unannounced and cried in our driveway about loyalty while Caleb sat in the truck refusing to step out.
We thought that was as bad as it would get.
Apparently, Denise knew better.
“How do you know this?” I asked.
She pulled a folded printout from her jacket pocket and handed it to me. It was a screenshot from a neighborhood Facebook group message, already deleted. Someone had captured it first. Caleb had posted, in a private men’s thread tied to the church my mother-in-law attended: Heading over tonight. She’s turned him against all of us. Time to get my brother back and straighten this out.
Below it, another message from a man named Wade Harper: Bring the truck. We may need to move some things fast before she starts crying abuse.
