My Brother’s Fiancée Dreaming of Our Wealth: “Just Waiting for the Real Money,” She Whispered

Part One

You think you know someone, and then the truth slits open the day like a box cutter. It was a sunlit Saturday in June, the sort of afternoon my mother would call wedding weather as if the sky had RSVP’d. My brother, Derek, had asked that we meet at our parents’ house for a casual engagement gathering—backyard, fairy lights, the excuse of a charcuterie board to justify buying four kinds of olives. I brought champagne, the good kind, because he was my little brother and because hope is a habit I have trouble breaking.

When I stepped through the door, Derek hugged me so hard my ribs protested. “Mara, you made it!” he said, the grin that got him out of so many detentions still perfect on his face.

“I made it,” I echoed, holding up the bottle. “Provision for a toast.”

Cousins and a few family friends filled the living room. My father played bartender with a theatrical air, as if pouring whiskey required applause. People congratulated me for my brother’s choice as if I, personally, had arranged it. I took their compliments like spare mints and turned toward the kitchen to slip the champagne into the fridge.

That’s when I heard her voice and the skin between my shoulders went tight. Elise—warm smile, expensive perfume, the new crown jewel—stood with my mother by the island, a slice of brie hovering between them like a small halo. Her voice, when she thought no one could hear, was a different creature entirely.

“…and did you see that tacky ring he got me?” she was saying, low and mocking. “I mean, if he’s as successful as he says—” she waggled her fingers, the diamond winking under the pendant light—“you’d think he could afford something halfway decent. But hey, once we’re married, it’s just a matter of time before I have access to the real money.”

My hand tightened spasmodically around the bottle neck. For a long half second, I waited for my mother to say what mothers are supposed to say: Elise, that’s unkind, or at least, We don’t speak about family like that. Instead, she hummed—a small, contented sound—and said, “Patience is a virtue.”

I backed into the hallway before they saw me, my brain buzzing like a house with faulty electricity. Derek’s voice—“Ready to get this party started?”—jerked me back into the living room where, annoyingly, it still looked like a party. I smiled the way you smile when you’ve chewed a lemon and pretended it was sugar.

We played our parts. Derek and Elise made rounds, gracious and glossy, absorbing well wishes. Elise held her ring finger in the air with an artful carelessness she’d probably practiced in the mirror. When people said, “You’re glowing,” she laughed and tilted her head to the right because the left was always for cameras. I watched her laugh with my mother over the crudités and imagined flipping the table into silence.

As the afternoon thinned and the guests drifted away in twos and threes, I tugged Derek toward the patio. I stood in that awkward space between accusing and not wanting to ruin his day and said, carefully, “Hey. I overheard something in the kitchen earlier. And I need you to hear me when I tell you Elise said she’s just… waiting. For the money.”

The smile drained. “What?”

“She mocked your ring.” I hated saying it. “She said that once you’re married she’ll have access to the ‘real money.’ She said it to Mom like they were ordering dessert.”

“That’s ridiculous.” His jaw stiffened in a way I recognized from arguments when he was a teenager and wrong. “Elise loves me.”

“I know it sounds like a bad sitcom, but I don’t watch those; I was there. I’m not—” I swallowed hard. “I’m not jealous. I’m worried. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“You are jealous,” he snapped. “You’ve always had to be the center of attention and you hate that I’m happy. I can’t believe you’d even suggest this.”

“I’m protecting you,” I said softly, which only made his eyes harder. He stormed inside and left me with the sound of the patio lights buzzing and the knowledge that love makes otherwise clever people temporarily stupid.

 

I didn’t sleep that night. I lay in bed and watched streetlight move in thin bars across the ceiling. The champagne had stayed too late behind my eyes. Elise’s voice pinged around my skull like a small hard thing. Real money. I texted someone I had no right to text at two in the morning: Jenna, do you still do private work? I need your help.

Jenna and I had shared a dorm room our freshman year—the size of a broom closet with a view of a brick wall—and a habit of telling the truth even when it made things complicated. She had become a private investigator in the same way I’d become a fundraiser for non-profits: stubbornness polished into trade. She didn’t respond that night, because she is a healthy adult who sleeps, but by nine the next morning, my phone chimed: For you, always. What’s the fire?

“Allegedly gold-digging fiancée,” I said when we met for coffee. “Brother blinded by love. Me: desperate. Say you’ll fix my life.”

“Hmm,” she said, a small smile. “We’ll see about fixing a life. But I can certainly fix a story.”

 

Three days later she slid a manila folder across a corner table at a quiet café. “I always liked handing you homework,” she said. Inside: bank statements, court records with names blacked out where necessary, testimonials from men who used phrases like bled dry and never saw it coming. Elise had a trail—luxury handbags and the receipts of men who had mistaken attention for affection. She specialized in long cons that ended with sudden departures.

“What do you need?” Jenna asked.

“For Derek to see what I saw. On paper.” I held up the folder. “And for him to believe what he reads more than what he wants.”

He didn’t want to meet me. He did anyway. I slid Jenna’s folder across the café table and watched him turn from page to page, the color in his face doing what color does when someone’s world tilts. “This—” he said, somewhere between denial and dawning. “This can’t be real.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, because there is really nothing else to say when you snip a wire that has been wrapped around someone’s heart.

 

 

Part Two

He pushed the folder back and stood up. “I need to think,” he said, and walked out into a morning he deserved better than. I stayed and stirred a coffee I couldn’t afford and breathed carefully because sometimes that’s all you can do.

His text pinged two days later: You were right. Confronted Elise. Wedding’s off. I owe you a massive apology. I was relieved for him. I was not relieved. Relief is what you feel when a storm stops. This felt like the sky deciding it would hold a different storm instead.

That night an unfamiliar number flashed on my phone. “You think you’re so clever,” Elise hissed when I answered. There are women who do rage quietly, and there are women who weaponize it like music. She is the latter. “You little busybody. You have no idea who you’re messing with. I have friends. I will make you regret your life.”

“Derek deserved the truth,” I said, aware I sounded like a growing pile of clichés and unable to care.

“This isn’t over,” she snapped, and hung up.

 

Fear arrived like a houseguest who brings their own pillow. I flinched at creaks and shadows. Then Derek told me about the charity gala. “I need something to keep me busy,” he said, as if event planning had ever been a balm. “For a good cause. It’ll be a classy distraction.”

“Danny Ocean would not approve,” I said, which got a smile out of him despite everything. I agreed to help because he was my brother, and because you do what keeps someone’s mind from circling a drain.

A week later, he showed me a text from Elise that tasted like acid: Looks like you’re going to have a full house. Shame if something were to happen to all those nice rich people. You’ve got great security, right? Hate for there to be… accidents.

“You have to cancel,” I said, because it was not hyperbole to imagine her leaning on a friend with a grudge and a few too many drinks. “No one dies for a silent auction.”

He did the right thing—for the first time in a long time that sentence describes my brother—with the kind of exhale you only hear from someone who has trained all his life to please people and is trying to unlearn it. He made the calls. He took the blame. He absorbed the angry emails and the vendor fury and the charity’s disappointment because the alternative might be reading a headline he could never live with.

 

The harassment escalated like it had a schedule. Threats, slashed tires, packages that buzzed ominously until Jenna’s friends with badges took them away. My car’s paint, keyed down to the primer: JEALOUS in ugly capitals. The police took reports and asked questions that made me want to smash a coffee cup into someone’s face. “We’ll investigate,” they said, which is useful and true and also like throwing confetti at a well.

Jenna’s voice on the phone was cinnamon and steel. “We keep building the case,” she said. “RICO this thing if we have to. Trust that she is as sloppy as she is vicious. They always are.”

I told Derek to keep the deadbolt locked even when he was home and to stop answering numbers he didn’t recognize. And then one Friday afternoon his name lit my screen: She’s here. His voice sounded like the first second after ice hits the back of your neck. “Elise. In my apartment.”

“Get out,” I said. “I’m calling the police.”

“She said if I call the police, she’ll hurt Mom and Dad.” He was crying and I hated him for it even as I wanted to put my hands on his cheeks.

“Keep her talking,” I said. “I’m on my way. Keep the line open.”

 

The apartment door was ajar when I got there. Jenna stood in the hall with two officers I recognized from a call earlier in the week. I pictured her at her desk earlier, making calls like she was casting and finding the right men with the right stubbornness. We went in together.

Elise sat on Derek’s couch like it belonged to her, legs crossed, one hand draped over the back, a picture of poise if you were looking from twenty feet away. Up close, the rage looked like a living thing. “Mara,” she purred. “So good of you to join us.”

“You need to leave,” I said, and my voice didn’t shake. I was finally tired of shaking.

She laughed. “Oh? I don’t think so,” she said. “Here’s how this goes. You drop this little act of yours. The evidence, the witnesses, the charity you care so much about—I don’t care. You stop. Or your parents will learn what it means to have a daughter with enemies.”

“I’m not afraid of you anymore,” I said.

“You should be.”

“Maybe,” I conceded. “But not today.”

 

Derek sent a text he and I had agreed on in such an eventuality—now—and moments later the apartment door burst open again. Jenna stepped forward first, not the officers, because she always claims the center stage in moments like this; justice loves an audience. “Elise Stanton,” she said, “you’re under arrest for extortion, criminal threats, fraud, and—as a bonus—violating an earlier restraining order.” She motioned to the officers behind her as if she had conjured them with her words. “We’ve been recording everything since you came in.”

It took two officers to cuff Elise because dignity doesn’t sit well with wrists behind the back. She twisted toward me as they led her to the door. “This isn’t over,” she snarled. “I will destroy you. I will destroy all of you.”

“No,” I said. “You already tried. You failed.” And because it mattered to say the true sentence out loud in that room where she could hear it: “We end you with the truth.”

 

In the days that followed, Jenna and I bathed in paperwork. The DA’s office loved her audio. The media loved the narrative. Dear God, how the media loved the narrative. And Elise—expert in flipping stories on their heads and calling the new shape “truth”—called a press conference from jail.

“I have been wrongfully convicted,” she declared. She named me as her persecutor, her stalker, her tormentor, the architect of her downfall. “She blackmailed me,” she said. “She bribed a juror. She tampered with the justice system to destroy me out of jealousy.” The reporter, whose job is to ask questions, asked none. They ran it as she said it: Breaking: Mara Newman Named in Jury Tampering Scandal.

I sat very still on my couch and watched my own name sloshing around in a stranger’s mouth. Then I called Jenna. “Fix it,” I said. From anyone else, that would have been a tantrum request. With her, it was a job assignment.

“We will,” she said. “They’ve always depended on other people’s laziness. We are not lazy.”

An old associate of Elise’s—none of us can decide if “associate” is generous or accurate—came forward with screen captures and a thumb drive from a phone Elise had broken in a rage and thrown into a bag he later rescued. The files showed messages in which she had approached a juror’s cousin with money and promises and vague threats. The DA’s office smiled, slowly, the way people do when they’ve found a key in an old jacket pocket. The story turned. The news ran a segment with a title that made me want to applaud a headline writer: Con Artist’s Con Flops: Alleged Jury Tampering Traced Back to Defendant. I turned the TV off and opened a window instead.

 

Elise’s network unraveled like cheap yarn. The more Jenna pulled, the faster it came apart. Crooked lawyers and eager “investors,” a cop who had looked away when looking would have helped, a judge who resigned quietly. The DA filed new charges with the kind of glee that makes me forgive district attorneys for everything else. Derek and I testified again, more tired, less afraid. Jenna played recordings in court that made both our parents cover their mouths on the wooden benches, which I will catalogue for my future therapist as a joy I did not expect.

The jury took longer this time because it was a RICO charge and people like to feel important when history is playing demi-god. They came back guilty on all counts. Elise stood in court and spat the sentence of a villain who has run out of syllables: “I’ll get out. I’ll come for you.” “You’ll age out first,” I said. “And that will be worse.”

As they led her away, I realized I did not feel triumphant. I felt full—not of victory, but of space. My life had room around it again. Derek walked out of the courthouse into a light he had not allowed himself to see for months. “Is it over?” he asked. “It’s over,” I said. We held hands like children crossing a street.

 

In the months that followed, my inbox filled with practical things instead of threats. A foundation in Chicago asked if I would speak about financial abuse disguised as romance. A radio show wanted a segment on “How to Protect Your Family From Con Artists.” I said yes to the first, no to the second, because nothing makes me want to smash a radio like pretending you can wrapped reality in ten minutes and ad breaks.

On Derek’s thirty-fifth birthday, we ate cake in his apartment, now devoid of flowers no one had asked him if he liked. He gave me the bigger slice. “Thank you,” he said into his fork. He meant it. I understand he didn’t mean it for years because he didn’t know the shape of the gratitude yet.

We are not naïve. Elise had friends. Maybe she still does. Life does not become a fairy tale because you toppled a witch. We hired a security firm that taught me to walk to my car with my keys pointing in between my fingers and not look at my phone in parking garages. I hate that my life includes the sentence I just typed. I accept it.

 

A final email, anonymous, arrived on a Tuesday in October when the sky remembered how to be blue. You think you’ve won. You have no idea what’s coming. Her friends have long memories. Watch your back. I forwarded it to Jenna and then to the DA. Jenna responded with a thumbs up emoji and then I ordered you a personal alarm. Humor me. The DA responded with, File #8732. On it. I made soup and texted Derek to come over. He brought bad bread and better wine and we ate with the TV off.

The thing about greed is that it requires an audience. Elise lost hers. If there is a network still out there, it is a handful of people in rooms that smell like old coffee and desperation. And if they come, we will do what we learned to do: we will record, and we will call, and we will say the sentence that saves me over and over because it is still true: slow and public.

We started a small project together, Derek and I, because we are better when our hands are full. We named it Glasshouse, a little two-room nonprofit that teaches people how to read contracts and trust their instincts and leave when the door is still open. We host free Saturday clinics where Jenna teaches everyone how to Google an investor’s LLC filing and I teach everyone how to trust the “off” feeling. We keep a jar of butterscotch candies on the desk because the woman at the copy shop we used for flyers did, and we both loved her for it.

 

Sometimes, late, I think about that June afternoon in our parents’ kitchen when the sun was kinder than the people in it. Just waiting for the real money, Elise had whispered to my mother like a friend telling a joke. I think about how someone else’s sentence cracked my family the way a dropped glass breaks and then keeps breaking even when you sweep the pieces. I think about the words I use now: we, proof, no, yes. They fit me better than the ones I used to wear.

The last time I saw Elise, she was escorted past us in the courthouse hall. She looked at me like she wanted to make me flinch. I didn’t. She looked at Derek like he was a bank and she had lost the pin. He didn’t flinch either. We didn’t speak. She turned the corner and disappeared into a room that locks from the outside. Her powerful friends can send all the anonymous emails the world has bandwidth for. She will eat institutional food. She will breathe institutional air. She will rehearse the story where she is the victim until she forgets the version where she is human. That is a fate I would not wish on anyone. That is also not my fault.

Elise used to dream of our wealth. The real money turned out to be the life we built when she was finished with us. We spent it carefully: on each other, on truth, on the kind of revenge you can live inside without choking. The rest we let burn.

END!