When we got back to Denver, Patricia Gaines drew up an amended promissory note. It was three pages and cost me $450 in legal fees, which I paid without thinking twice.
The balance of $36,812.44 would be repaid over six years at the original four percent interest, in monthly payments of $576. The first payment was due sixty days later. My lien on the equipment would stay in place until the loan was paid off. And if Dad ever wanted to sell or retire, my loan would be paid off first from the proceeds of the business.
Dad signed it in Patricia’s office in Littleton on a Tuesday morning in November. Mom sat beside him. When he finished, he set down the pen and looked across the conference table at me.
“You know what your grandfather would’ve said?”
“What?”
“He’d have said you’re a Miller through and through. Stubborn as a mule and twice as smart as whoever’s arguing with you.”
Patricia smiled behind her reading glasses.
Dad has made every single payment on time, all fourteen of them so far. The first one came in an envelope with a handwritten note: “Payment 1 of 72. Love, Dad.”
He’s done that every month since. The notes are getting longer.
Brandon Smith turned out to be exactly what Kelsey Morrow said he was. Three months after the cruise, Kelsey, the woman from Fort Collins, and the woman from Boulder filed a joint complaint with the Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office. Vanessa gave them a written statement, along with screenshots of every message Brandon sent her about “investors” and the Colorado Springs subdivision. The subdivision didn’t exist either. I checked with the El Paso County planning department, and there had never been a forty-home development application in the location Brandon described.
In the spring, the district attorney charged Brandon with three counts of theft by deception. The court records showed he’d taken $67,000 from women over four years. As part of a plea agreement, he was sentenced to four years of supervised probation and ordered to pay full restitution to all three women at $500 a month. Kelsey told Vanessa it would take him eleven years to pay her back at that rate.
“But at least he has to pay,” Kelsey said. “And at least everybody knows.”
Vanessa changed the locks on her apartment the week we got home. Brandon’s things went into black garbage bags on the landing, the same way Mom had stacked my childhood things in boxes when I left for college. He picked them up at two in the morning and left a note taped to her door.
“You’ll regret this. Your sister ruined everything.”
Vanessa photographed the note, gave it to the district attorney’s investigator, and threw it away.
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