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She was tucked in securely with her arms flailed outward as she dreamed whatever four-year-old girls without a care in the world dreamed about.
Collins didn’t realize her mother had been here, and I was here to keep it that way. She deserved a childhood experience that was free from trauma—one full of love and joy and perfectly positioned to keep the privileges she had been granted.
It didn’t matter that I hadn’t grown up with a father, and it didn’t matter that Collins had grown up without a mother figure beyond my own mom as a nanny. I smoothed her golden curls from her forehead, kissed it, and steeled myself against the onslaught I believed was immediately in our future.
I returned downstairs to find Jason and Lauren nervous and pacing.
“What’s wrong?” I asked them.
“Graham should be back by now,” Lauren said. “And he’s not answering his phone. We’ve been trying it.”
Lauren and Jason stared at me in a way I found unnerving. I slowly crossed the foyer and seated myself where I’d been earlier.
“Collins is just fine,” I informed the room at large. “In case anyone is concerned.”
Lauren exhaled what had to have been the entire contents of her lungs before flinging herself on the couch. She’d exhumed another bottle of wine from Graham’s supplies.
“We knew she would be,” Jason assured me. “No one’s going in or out of this house without us realizing it.”
The popping of the cork from the bottle Lauren had purloined made us all jump as she laughed sheepishly.
“Here’s something Josie doesn’t realize,” Lauren announced when we were deep into the bottle despite Jason’s protests. He didn’t consider the case won until we had obliterated Josie from even having a possibility of winning custody of Collins. He was already working on a restraining order that would have more teeth than usual. I appreciated that kind of dedication. “That we don’t even give a shit,” Lauren continued. “We don’t. We know she’s not going to win, and so what if she did? She couldn’t break in here and take Collins. This is a fucking fortress.”
“It’s not about that,” I said. “It’s about shaking up the system of control. We know she can do it now. Think about it. We took it to the courts, and we’re still wondering if it’s over. This is a game Josie has orchestrated.”
“She’s gone, Heather,” Jason said. “It’s done.”
“Then why haven’t you gathered all your papers, closed all your folders, and put all those books away?” I demanded. “All three of us understand what she can do and the strings she can pull to tumble us all down.”
“I’m here in support,” Jason said, holding his hands up in protest. “I’m here because Graham’s my friend.”
I shook my head, upset and still feeling like there was danger lurking around every corner. “That’s fine. I’m being ridiculous. I’m just nervous—everything’s fine.”
“Heather, wait.” Lauren reached out to me, trying to comfort me. “We believe you that something else might be going on. If we didn’t, we would’ve been out of here the moment we heard the mediation didn’t go in her favor.”
“I don’t understand why she’s doing what she’s doing,” I said. “Or how she’s doing it.”
“This is a lot,” Lauren allowed. “And this wine is pretty heady. Do you want to go to bed?”
Before Graham was safely home? Hell, no. “No, I have some work I still need to do before I head that way.”
“Okay.” Lauren relaxed back into the couch, and Jason returned to his supervision over the papers scattered over the dining room table. “Let’s have another glass of wine, then, and wait for him to get home.”
It was so hard to wait when I was certain something was wrong, especially when it was Graham. I couldn’t imagine anything bad happening to him, and it made me sick to do so.
I struggled to distract myself on my laptop when a notification for a text message popped up in the corner of the screen. It was from an unknown number, and I started to move to delete it when another message followed it. And another.
Unsure why my heart was thundering in my chest, I opened the message thread.
“You’re the other woman,” the first read, and my blood froze.
22
Heather
The second text was even direr. “You’ll never be his family.”
Shaking so hard that Lauren paused midway through a drink of her wine to stare at me, I opened my messaging window to see the third text—an image.
