Page 15 of Family Bonds- Garrett & Justine

“Never!” Jordan yelled. “What is wrong with you?”

“Nothing!” she yelled back. “You know as well as I do that nothing she says is true. But my point is, even if Dad was this horrible person she is telling everyone he is, I still wouldn’t give her a dime. She’s stupid to even think that.”

“I’m hoping she drowns in a bottle of vodka one night. It would serve her well,” Jordan said.

She’d had a lot of those thoughts too but wouldn’t voice them like her sister. “I don’t think it would surprise anyone.”

“You’ll come back for the trial, right? When it happens?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Depends on if I can get the time off. I had to relocate for six months.”

“What?” Jordan asked. “Why am I hearing about this now? What is going on?”

She hadn’t wanted to burden her sister with her minor problems when she knew Jordan had so much going on with her career and was grieving their father too.

She explained the situation. “So I’m not far, just not in Boston. It’s a completely different lifestyle here. Today was my first day.”

“You’ve been there three days,” Jordan said. “How do you even know what is or isn’t different enough?”

“Well, the fact I’m sitting on my balcony right now and don’t even hear any neighbors is one thing.”

Though she was in an apartment complex, she was in the smallest building and the furthest away. Someone had told her it was a new building and that more would be built in the coming years.

She wouldn’t be here when that happened, with any luck, and wouldn’t hear that noise.

She was enjoying the quiet.

“That’s great,” Jordan said. “Maybe it’s a good thing that you’re there. Do you have a space for me if I get a break and want to fly out? Not that I see that happening, but I might in the next six months.”

“I’ve got a sofa,” she said. “If not, we’ll get you a hotel.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Jordan said. “The two of us always do.”

“We do,” she said.

“Other than your new place, how is everything else? That has to suck that your apartment is empty and you’re paying on that.”

“They are paying for this place,” she said. “And I subleased mine out. So I’m actually making out better than I thought. Not that we have to worry about those things.”

Jordan laughed. “No. Good old Dad. I had no clue how much money there was, did you?”

“No,” she said. “Do you think that is why Elise did it?”

It wasn’t just the investments, the assets, or their cash accounts. It was a life insurance policy that their father had bought years ago when they were younger in case something happened to him. Two million dollars. One million for each of his daughters.

She and Jordan knew none of this.

When their mother found out their father was murdered, she called right away to find out whose name was on that policy. Like her mother thought her father would have forgotten and left his ex-wife’s name on it.

Guess her father had foul taste in women when it came down to it, but from what she’d seen, her mother’s name never was on it. They were taken out for the children after her parents divorced.

“I don’t know why she did anything,” she said. “Elise says she doesn’t remember, then said it was self-defense. The fact she was drunk as hell when she called the police after she shot Dad kind of hurt her case.”

“No ‘kind of’ about it. It is good for us,” Jordan said.

“Yep.”

“Dad had defense wounds on him,” Jordan said. “I just don’t know what to think.”

---