CHAPTER 7
The trial was scheduled to begin in three months.
The DA’s office was busy building its case, interviewing witnesses, organizing evidence, preparing for every argument Voss might make. Marquez was confident—she had won tougher cases, she said, with less evidence. But she also warned us that Voss would not play fair. That he would hit us where it hurt. That he would do anything to win.
She was right.
The first blow came in the form of a lawsuit.
Voss, acting on Dad’s behalf, filed a civil suit against Lila, claiming that she had “emotionally and financially exploited” her own father for years, that she had “manipulated” him into giving her money and attention, that her “constant demands and exaggeration of symptoms” had been the direct cause of his “mental breakdown” on Christmas Eve.
The suit was absurd.
It had no basis in fact.
But it did not need to.
It was designed to do one thing: distract us, drain us, make us look like the villains instead of the victims. It was designed to make Lila look like a greedy, manipulative daughter who had driven her poor, overworked father to the edge of sanity.
And the press ate it up.
“FATHER ACCUSED OF TRYING TO KILL DAUGHTER CLAIMS SHE MANIPULATED HIM FOR YEARS” the headlines screamed. “TERRIBLE TWIST IN CHRISTMAS EVE GARAGE TRAGEDY.” “WHO IS THE REAL VICTIM IN THE CARTER FAMILY DRAMA?”
Suddenly, we were not just witnesses in a criminal trial.
We were public figures.
People recognized us on the street. Strangers sent us messages—some supportive, some vicious, accusing Lila of lying, of ruining her father’s life, of being a gold digger. Someone posted our address online, and for a week we had to stay with friends while the police investigated.
Lila retreated into herself.
She stopped leaving the apartment. She stopped answering her phone. She stopped going to therapy. She would sit on the couch for hours, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the wall, saying nothing.
Mom, meanwhile, was fighting her own battles.
Voss had leaked information to the press about her own history—about the time she had been arrested for shoplifting when she was nineteen, about the affair she had had with a coworker ten years earlier, about her struggles with anxiety and depression. None of it was relevant to the case. None of it had anything to do with what Dad had done.
But it was all over the news.
“Carter Matriarch’s Secret Past Revealed” the tabloids blared. “A FAMILY BUILT ON LIES.”
Mom called me, sobbing, one night.
“I can’t do this,” she said. “They’re destroying me. They’re destroying all of us. Voss is saying I knew about Lila’s ‘manipulation,’ that I helped her, that we were both just using your father for his money. People are looking at me like I’m a monster. My own sister won’t return my calls.”
“Mom,” I said. “It’s just noise. It’s Voss’s strategy. He wants us to break. He wants us to drop the charges so all of this will go away. But if we do that, Dad wins. And he’ll be free to do this again. To someone else. Maybe even to you.”
Mom was quiet.
Then she said something that surprised me.
“Your father called again,” she said. “From jail. He said if we drop the charges, if we tell the police we made a mistake, that it was all a misunderstanding, he’ll drop the civil suit. He said he’ll go away, get help, never bother us again. He said he still loves us. That he just wants this to be over.”
I felt cold.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I told him to go to hell,” Mom said.
And for the first time in weeks, I smiled.
“That’s my mom,” I said.
The second blow came from an unexpected direction.
Dad’s lawyer filed a motion to introduce evidence of my own financial situation. Voss argued that I had “significant motive” to fabricate the allegations against Dad, that I was deeply in debt, that I stood to inherit Lila’s money if something happened to her, that I had manipulated Lila and Mom into pressing charges to get my hands on the settlement money and the insurance payouts.
It was true that I had debt.
Student loans, mostly. A little credit card debt from when Lila was in the hospital a few years back and I had to cover some of her bills. Nothing unusual. Nothing criminal.
But Voss did not need it to be criminal.
He just needed it to look suspicious.
He filed documents showing my bank balances, my credit score, the fact that I had borrowed money from Lila once—five thousand dollars, three years earlier, when I had lost my job and could not pay my rent. I had paid her back, with interest, within a year. But Voss left that part out.
Suddenly, I was the greedy brother.
The mastermind.
The one who had orchestrated the whole thing to get rich.
The headlines changed again.
“BROTHER MOTIVATED BY MONEY IN CHRISTMAS EVE ATTACK, DEFENSE CLAIMS.” “THE CARTER FAMILY: A WEB OF GREED AND BETRAYAL.”
It was unbearable.
But we kept going.
Marquez filed counter-motions, fought back in the press, did everything she could to counter Voss’s narrative. But Voss was a master of media manipulation. He knew exactly how to feed the press just enough information to keep the story alive, to keep the doubt growing, to keep people asking questions.
Then came the third blow.
And this one almost broke us.
Voss announced that he had a new witness.
Someone who would testify that Lila had, in fact, locked herself in the garage.
Someone who would testify that she had done it to get attention, to frame her father, to finally be the center of the drama she had always craved.
The witness was a woman named Karen.
She had been our next-door neighbor for fifteen years.
I could not believe it.
Karen had always been nice to us. She had brought Lila soup when she was sick. She had come to our birthday parties. She had sat on her porch and waved at us every morning.
And now she was going to testify against us.
Marquez deposed her.
Karen’s story was that she had seen Lila go into the garage herself on Christmas Eve, that she had seen her close the door, that she had heard the click of the padlock from the inside. She claimed Lila had been “acting strange” all week, “moping around,” “complaining that no one paid enough attention to her.” She said Lila had once told her that “sometimes you have to make people notice you, even if it means doing something drastic.”
It was all lies.
Every word.
But Karen said it with a straight face, with tears in her eyes, with the conviction of someone who believed her own story.
Or someone who had been paid to believe it.
Marquez tried to find inconsistencies in her testimony. She pointed out that Karen’s kitchen window—the one she claimed to have been looking out of—faced the wrong direction, that she could not possibly have seen the garage door from there. She asked Karen why she had not mentioned any of this to the police on Christmas Eve, when they were at the house, when they were asking neighbors if they had seen or heard anything.
Karen had answers for everything.
She had been standing on her back porch, she said. Not by the kitchen window. She had been too shocked to say anything to the police, she said. She had needed time to process what she had seen. She had been afraid of getting involved.
It was all very convincing.
And very, very wrong.
We found out the truth a week later.
Mom was going through old bank statements, looking for something else entirely, when she found it. A check, written to Karen, from Dad’s personal account. For twenty-five thousand dollars. Dated two days after Dad’s arrest.
The check had been mailed from the jail.
Dad had somehow managed to get a check to Karen—probably through Uncle Ray, who had been visiting him regularly. And Karen, who had been struggling financially, whose own daughter was sick and needed expensive medication, had taken it.
She had sold her testimony for twenty-five thousand dollars.
And for the price of her daughter’s medical bills, she had been willing to send an innocent man to prison and let a would-be murderer walk free.
Marquez was furious.
She filed a motion to have Karen’s testimony excluded. She filed criminal charges against both Karen and Dad for witness tampering and bribery. She held a press conference where she laid out the evidence—the check, the timing, Karen’s financial troubles, the fact that her story did not match the physical evidence.
The tide turned.
Suddenly, the headlines were about Voss’s “star witness” being caught in a lie. About Dad bribing a neighbor to perjure himself. About the defense’s case crumbling.
Karen was arrested.
She eventually agreed to testify against Dad in exchange for immunity. She told the DA everything—how Uncle Ray had approached her, how he had offered her the money, how he had told her exactly what to say, how Dad had promised her more if the trial went well.
Uncle Ray was arrested too.
Voss, meanwhile, distanced himself from the whole thing, claiming he had no knowledge of the bribery, that Karen had approached him with her story, that he had believed her. No one believed him. But there was no proof he had been involved, so he stayed on the case.
The damage had been done, though.
Not just to Voss’s credibility.
But to us.
We had survived the attacks on Lila’s mental health, on Mom’s past, on my finances, on our character. We had survived the lies and the manipulation and the press circus.
But we were tired.
May you like
So tired.
And the trial was still two months away.
