According to my mother, Frederica had made a play for my father, who had instead chosen to marry my mom. Then it was love at first sight when my aunt met Thurston Cottonwood, a man forty years her senior. (My father liked to say it was love at first sight of Thurston’s medical history.) He had a heart condition, more money than even the Bransons, and Frederica expected him to not last long. Good old Uncle Thurston was now in his nineties, and thanks to his ironclad prenup, when he traded Frederica in for a new twenty-four-year-old model, she walked away with only $1 million. Which she blew
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