The recording kept playing. And it got worse.

“If Diane asks, I forget,” my father said on the tape. A pause. Then a little laugh. “I always forget. That’s the beauty of it.”

Diane is me. That’s my name. My own father, on a recording, laughing about how easy it was to fool me.

I felt my face go hot. Not crying yet. Just this awful burning in my cheeks, like I’d been slapped in front of everyone. Aunt Carol whispered, “Oh my God.” Somebody’s kid started to ask a question and got hushed. Twenty-two people staring at my father, and my father just sat there. He looked at Ethan. Then he looked at Patricia. And the vacant old man we’d all been tiptoeing around for a year was gone. His eyes were perfectly clear.

That’s when I knew it was all fake. Every spoonful. Every weather report. Every time I’d held his hand and told him it was okay, Mom would’ve been proud of him. All of it, a show he put on for me.

Ethan didn’t stop the recording. He let it run into static and then he turned to Patricia. “Want to tell her how long,” he said. Quiet. Not even angry. That was somehow worse.

Patricia put her fork down. Finally. Her hand was shaking. She looked at Roy, not at me, and she said, “Tell them. Tell them all of it.” Her voice cracked. “Tell them what we did with Ethan’s college money.”

The room made a sound. I can’t describe it. Like everyone sucked in air at the same time.

Ethan’s college fund. Forty-one thousand dollars. My mom started it the day he was born. She put in birthday money, tax-refund money, whatever she had. It was the one thing she left that felt like her. And here’s the part that makes me want to throw up even now.

Those papers I signed last spring, the ones “for the dementia.” One of them moved that fund into a joint account. Roy’s name. Patricia’s name. They told me it was to “protect his assets from the nursing home.”