MY SISTER-IN-LAW DESTROYED MY 8-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER'S HOMEMADE BIRTHDAY CAKE. WHEN I THREW HER $2,000 DESIGNER PURSE INTO THE FIRE, MY ENTIRE FAMILY TURNED AGAINST ME.

On Wednesday afternoon, before heading back to Deadwood for the final evening push, I made a stop I had been dreading for seventy-two hours.

The Black Hills Limestone Quarry sat six miles outside Rapid City, a massive terraced gouge of white and gray stone carved into the foothills. The air hung thick with white stone dust that coated the cedar trees and pickup trucks like unseasonal snow.

I parked my truck outside the modular operations trailer, stepped out into the dust, and pushed open the heavy aluminum door.

Travis was sitting behind a laminate desk buried under shipping manifests, safety logs, and empty energy drink cans. He looked terrible. His eyes were bloodshot, his beard was unkempt, and the skin beneath his eyes was bruised with exhaustion. He had clearly been pulling double shifts.

When he looked up and saw me standing in the doorway, his jaw tightened instantly.

"What are you doing here, Becca?" he rasped, his voice rough from dust and shouting over rock crushers. "I told you we don't have anything to talk about. The sheriff's deputy said it's a civil matter, but Vanessa filed the court papers. You'll get served."

"I already got served, Trav," I said quietly, closing the door behind me.

"Then write the check!" Travis snapped, slamming his flat palm onto the desk, sending a cloud of chalky dust into the air. "Just pay her the two grand, Becca! Pay her so she stops screaming! She’s been crying for four days straight! The kids are miserable, my mother is calling me every two hours demanding to know why I haven't put you in prison, and I haven't slept more than three hours a night because Vanessa is having panic attacks!"

I looked at my brother—really looked at him.

He didn't look like an angry, vengeful husband. He looked like an animal caught in a steel trap, chewing its own leg off just to make the pain stop.

"Travis," I said, keeping my voice soft, calm, and measured. "How much money did you give Vanessa for that bag in January?"

Travis frowned, thrown off balance by the question. "What does that matter?"

"Answer me. Please."

He rubbed a dusty hand over his face. "Twenty-two hundred dollars. Cash. I worked eighty hours of overtime in the dead of winter, breaking frozen rock in negative-ten-degree weather, so she could buy that damn bag in Denver. She said having an authentic bag was important for her online business image. She said clients judge you by your accessories."

I walked over to his desk, reached into my pocket, and pulled out the small Ziploc bag containing the melted zinc zipper pull. I set it down directly on top of his shipping manifest.

"What is that?" he asked, staring at it with distaste. "Garbage from the fire?"

"It’s the interior zipper pull from the bag I burned," I said. "Look at the stamp on the back."

Travis didn't touch it. "I don't know anything about purses, Becca."

"You know about metal, Travis," I said firmly. "You’ve worked in this quarry for twelve years. You repair heavy excavators. What metal is that?"

Travis hesitated. He reached out with two grease-stained fingers and picked up the scorched piece of hardware. He turned it over, scraping the blistered gray surface with his thumbnail.

His brow furrowed. "It's cast pot metal. Cheap zinc alloy."

"Does a twenty-two-hundred-dollar French luxury bag use zinc pot metal that melts at seven hundred degrees and flakes under a thumbnail?"

Travis stared at the metal. The silence in the trailer stretched so thin I could hear the hum of the fluorescent light tubes overhead.

"She bought it at *The Luxe Vault* in Cherry Creek," Travis said, but his voice lacked conviction. It sounded hollow, like a man reciting lines from a script he had stopped believing. "She showed me the receipt. She has the box."

"The receipt she submitted to the court is a fake, Travis," I said gently. "She generated it online. The sales tax rate is wrong. The timestamp is from ten o'clock on a Sunday night. And that bag was a twenty-dollar replica she probably bought out of the trunk of a car or ordered from China."

Travis’s face drained of color. The stone dust on his cheeks made him look like a ghost.

"Why would she do that?" he whispered, his voice cracking. "Why would she lie to me about that?"

"Where did the other two thousand one hundred and eighty dollars go, Trav?"

He didn't answer. He couldn't.

Because in the back of his mind, the puzzle pieces were finally starting to align. The packages arriving daily on the porch. The secret credit card statements he wasn't allowed to see. The constant, desperate need to project an image of luxury and wealth to strangers on the internet while his bank account hovered near zero.

"You're trying to break us up," Travis said suddenly, his eyes darting up, panic replacing his shock. He shoved the piece of metal back across the desk toward me. "You’re jealous! You've always been jealous because Vanessa has style, and she’s pretty, and I have a family and you don't!"

"Travis, listen to yourself—"

"Get out!" he shouted, standing up so violently his rolling chair crashed back into the steel wall of the trailer. "Get out of my office, Becca! You burned her purse! You ruined Sadie's birthday! Mom was right about you—you ruin everything you touch because you're miserable!"

I looked at my brother for five long seconds.

The pity I felt for him was almost worse than the anger. He was drowning, and instead of grabbing the life preserver, he was trying to drag me down with him to keep his wife’s fantasy afloat.

"I won't pay her, Travis," I said quietly, picking up the Ziploc bag and slipping it back into my pocket. "Not one cent. And when we walk into that courtroom on November 14th, she’s going to have to explain that receipt to a judge under oath. You better make sure you're sitting in the front row when she does."