“Isn’t it true she sacrificed for you?”
“She told me she did.”
“Isn’t it true that Mr. Calloway promised you financial support if you testified?”
I almost stood up.
Brandon’s eyes moved to me, then back to the lawyer.
“No.”
“Nothing at all?”
“He gave me toast the morning my mother was arrested.”
A few people in the gallery shifted. The judge looked over his glasses.
The lawyer frowned. “Toast?”
“Yes,” Brandon said. “That’s the only thing Mr. Calloway has given me besides the chance to tell the truth.”
Emma cried silently beside me.
The prior victims testified too.
Marianne Doyle came from Charlotte with a cane and a pale pink scarf. She looked fragile until she began to speak. Then her voice filled the courtroom. She described Diane holding her hand, crying about treatments, promising repayment, calling her a sister. She described the day she learned there had been no cancer. She said the money hurt, but the humiliation hurt worse.
“I stopped going to my church group,” she said. “I stopped answering calls. I thought everyone would know I had been stupid.”
“You were not stupid,” the prosecutor said.
Marianne looked at Diane.
“I know that now.”
Judge Bellamy from Atlanta testified with clipped precision, anger tucked into every syllable. Vincent Martelli from Naples testified with his jaw tight and his hands folded like he was resisting the urge to break something. He and I met outside the courthouse on the third day of testimony. He was a broad man with silver hair and a scar over one eyebrow.
“You’re Calloway,” he said.
“I am.”
He shook my hand hard.
“Vincent Martelli.”
“I know who you are.”
He nodded toward the courthouse. “Thank you.”
“I didn’t do much.”
“You did what I didn’t.” He looked away. “I never had the guts. I kept thinking, how does a man like me admit he got taken by a fake vineyard? My sons warned me. My accountant warned me. I wanted to believe I’d found something good.”
“That’s what they sell,” I said.
