Chapter 4 - The Crack in the Foundation
I was having room service coffee by the window overlooking the courtyard when my phone rang. It wasn't Daniel. It was our twenty-four-year-old daughter, Maya, her voice tight with a mixture of disbelief and residual anger.
“Mom? Are you at the Hawthorne?” Maya asked without preamble.
“Good morning to you too, sweetie. Yes, I am.”
“Dad called me about an hour ago,” Maya said, her tone dripping with disgust. “He was completely unhinged. He said he saw you in the lobby last night with some guy—some younger, well-dressed man—and he demanded to know if you’ve been seeing someone behind his back during the separation.”
I couldn't help the small smile that touched my lips. “Did he now?”
“Mom, are you serious? He’s parading his girlfriend around town, but he’s losing his mind because you were having a drink with a man? I told him off, obviously. I told him he had zero right to police your life after everything he’s put us through. But then he hung up on me.”
“Thank you for sticking up for me, Maya, but you don't need to worry about it. The man I was with wasn't a date.”
There was a brief pause on the line. “Then who was it?”
“Your cousin Michael. He flew in to help with Grandma’s estate boxes.”
A sharp gasp of laughter echoed through the phone. “Uncle Michael? That Michael? Dad didn't recognize him?”
“Not for a second,” I chuckled. “He took one look at Michael’s beard and his posture, assumed the worst, and completely lost his composure right in the middle of the lobby. And the best part? Rachel saw the whole thing. She spent the entire evening interrogating him.”
“Oh, that is poetic justice,” Maya whispered, genuine delight replacing the tension in her voice. “Dad hates losing control of anything. You have no idea how much he’s been bragging to his coworkers about how easily I accepted Rachel.”
“Well, darling,” I said softly, looking out at the crisp autumn morning. “Your father is about to learn a very expensive lesson about assumptions.”
May you like
What Maya didn't know—and what Daniel’s attorney was about to discover on Monday morning—was that Daniel’s blind jealousy in the Hawthorne lobby had triggered a chain reaction. That very night, while Daniel was pacing his hotel suite demanding answers about my supposed mystery man, Rachel had finally reached her breaking point. Tired of being treated like a second-class priority while Daniel obsessed over my life, she had gone through his laptop while he was in the shower.
And she had found the folder labeled Carter & Associates Contingency, containing the hidden offshore accounts Daniel swore to her didn't exist.
