I brought a folder. The folder was not meant to prove that every difficult moment in the relationship had been Minerva's fault. It held a short timeline, the messages she had sent me before the engagement, the written pickup arrangement, the property collection receipt, the vehicle report, and the communications from Landon. I showed Doris only the items that were relevant and didn't expose private financial account details. She read slowly, pausing at a message dated three days before the dinner.
"She told me you hadn't been together since spring," Doris said.
"She sent that to me on Monday night. On Thursday she told me about Landon. Until then, she hadn't told me we were broken up at all."
Doris looked at the heart emoji beneath the message and pressed her lips together. "And Landon proposed on Wednesday."
"That's what she said."
"She told us you'd been sleeping in separate rooms for months."
"We slept in the same bed on Wednesday night," I said. "I wish that sentence didn't matter, but it does."
She set the page down as though it were heavier than paper. I could see her making an effort not to defend Minerva before finishing the evidence. I respected that effort. It was difficult for her in a way I hadn't fully considered: she had to reconcile what she loved about her daughter with things she was discovering that she could not reasonably excuse.
"She told me you used police to frighten her," Doris said.
"The officers were there. They told both of us this was a civil matter and that nobody was being forcibly evicted. Minerva said she wanted to move out that night. They documented it. Billie picked up the rest."
Doris nodded slowly. "And the car?"
"I let her use it while we were together. She took it after moving out, without asking, and kept it after I explicitly requested it back. The police reviewed the evidence and recovered it. Whatever charges follow aren't mine to decide."
For a long minute she didn't speak. Then she rubbed her temples and said, "I knew some things weren't adding up. I didn't want to believe how many."
I could have made a sarcastic comment then. I had several ready. Instead, I drank my coffee and waited. Doris began telling me about Minerva as a teenager, not to justify what she'd done, but to explain why the family had repeatedly found itself confronting different versions of the same behavior. At sixteen, she had dated two boys while telling each that the other was a cousin. When the truth came out, she'd cried, said she felt misunderstood, and persuaded her father to reduce the consequences until there were practically none.