But Caleb had driven past the restaurant where Todd supposedly was, and it was closed.
Had been closed for renovation for 2 weeks.
Caleb didn’t confront anyone about it.
He just told me.
The second thing happened in April.
I got a LinkedIn message from a woman named Jenna who worked at the same medical supply company as Todd.
She said she’d found my profile through a mutual connection and wanted to connect.
Normal enough.
But then she sent a follow-up message that said, “Hey, are you Paige’s brother? I think we should talk.”
I stared at that message for a long time.
I didn’t respond right away.
I sat on it for 2 days because I wanted to make sure I was doing this for the right reasons.
Was I trying to help my sister, or was I trying to prove a point?
Was I trying to protect Paige, or was I trying to vindicate myself for what I’d said at that dinner?
Honestly, it was both.
And I decided that both was good enough.
I wrote Jenna back.
“Yeah, I’m Paige’s brother. What’s going on?”
Her response came in 20 minutes.
And it changed everything.
Not just the situation with Todd.
It changed the entire trajectory of what happened next.
Because what Jenna told me wasn’t just confirmation of what I suspected.
It was worse.
A lot worse.
But before I could even process that information, something else happened.
Something I never saw coming.
And it came from the last person I expected.
My dad called me.
My dad calling me was about as expected as a blizzard in July.
Keith Mitchell doesn’t call people.
He summons them.
He makes pronouncements.
He waits for you to come to him because, in his mind, he’s always the one who’s been wronged.
Even when he’s the one who did the wronging.
So when I saw Dad flash across my phone screen on a Tuesday evening in mid-April, I genuinely thought someone had died.
“Anthony,” he said.
No hello.
No “How are you?”
Just my name.
Like he was confirming I existed.
“Dad.”
There was a pause.
A long one.
I could hear him breathing, and in the background, the low murmur of whatever news channel he’d been watching.
Then he said something that almost knocked me off my chair.
“I think something’s going on with Todd.”
I waited.
I didn’t jump in.
I’ve learned that with my dad, silence is more effective than talking.
If you talk, he argues.
If you’re silent, he fills the space.
“Your mother and I had them over last weekend,” he continued. “Todd was on his phone the whole time. Paige seemed off. Quiet. She looks tired, Anthony. Thin. Not healthy thin.”
Another pause.
“Your mother thinks I’m imagining things. But I’m not imagining things.”
I sat there processing the irony of my father.
The man who had laughed when Todd called me a loser.
The man who had spent years treating Todd like the golden son-in-law.
Calling me to say he was worried.
Part of me wanted to say something sharp.
Something like, “Oh, so now you want to talk to me?”
But Drew’s voice was in my head.
This isn’t about you.
This is about Paige.
“Dad,” I said carefully. “I think you’re right. And I think it’s worse than you think.”
I told him the basics.
Not everything.