“Bill?” I asked. My voice sounded small. “What is he talking about?”

Bill didn’t answer. He just let out a long, ragged breath, and for the first time in thirty years, he looked like a man who had finally been caught in a lie he couldn’t talk his way out of.

Matthew turned to me, his eyes wet but hard as stones. “He didn’t want you to know the truth, Mom. He didn’t want you to know that he was the one taking the money from the business account. He knew Teresa was the only one who saw the bank statements.”

The room spun. I reached out to grab the back of the pew, but I missed.

“He used you,” Matthew said, his voice trembling now. “He wrote those notes. He knew you were jealous. He knew if he could make you turn on her, you would be the one to drive her away. He knew you would be the one to do the dirty work so he wouldn’t have to look like the monster.”

I looked at the notes in Matthew’s hand. I looked at the purple wig on the floor.

The notes weren’t about me. They weren’t about jealousy. They were a smoke screen. Bill had been siphoning money from the accounts for years, and Teresa, with her sharp eyes and her head for numbers, had started asking questions he couldn’t answer.

He didn’t just let me hate her. He cultivated it. He fed it like a garden.

Bill finally looked up, his face gray. “I didn’t have a choice,” he whispered.

Nobody moved. The photographer just stood there, her camera hanging by the strap around her neck, capturing it all.

I thought I was the one pulling the strings. I thought I was the one who held the power in this family. I was just the distraction. I was the fool who bought a wig to ruin a wedding, never realizing the person I was really working for was the man sitting next to me.

I don’t know what happened after that. I remember walking out of the church alone. I remember the cold air hitting my face and feeling like I was finally waking up from a long, bad dream.

Matthew doesn’t talk to me anymore. Teresa doesn’t talk to me. I sold the house in the mill town. I live in a studio apartment now, three states away.

I still have that purple wig somewhere in a box. I can’t bring myself to throw it away, but I can’t look at it either. It’s just a piece of plastic, but it represents the moment I realized I had spent my entire life being played by someone who claimed to love me.