Chapter Ten
“Hello? Hello, is this Mrs. Prado?”
Crackling came through the speakers, followed by a thin, weedy voice. “... is this?”
I checked the screen, clicking my tongue at the weak signal. Reception wasn’t so great deep in the trees—which is where the founders of Lantana Little Learners Day School insisted on building the elementary school.
I climbed out of the passenger seat, waving around the phone and moving farther and farther away from the car trying to catch a signal.
“Hello? Can you hear me?” I asked. “This is Ms. Kim of Kim Manor. I’m calling to speak to Mrs. Prado.”
“Mrs. Eleanor Prado?” came back clearly. “Is that who you need?”
“Yes, it is. Are you her?”
“I’m her daughter,” replied a smoky voice. “Mom’s out walking the dogs, but she should be back soon. Do you want to wait, or call her back?”
“I’ll wait. Thank you.”
I strolled the length of two parking spaces, eyeing Micah out of the corner of my eye. He loitered outside the school entrance with the other pickup parents, chatting up three attractive, well-dressed moms who were hanging on his every word.
That they were fawning over him, despite all boasting wedding rings, did not surprise me. What did surprise me was actually being there to watch.
I woke up that morning with the surprise of my life—Micah’s arm thrown over me, and his chest warm and steady at my back. I ended up slipping out from under him to sneak back to my room—which was clean and vomit-free just like he promised.
After showering and getting dressed, I went downstairs into the dining room and discovered Lily munching on buttered toast and cinnamon oatmeal. Micah set a bowl and plate down on the table for me before I even asked.
Together the three of us ate with the conversation focused on Lily and the activities they had planned for her at school.
When we were done, Micah invited me to join them for drop-off, but I was so weirded out by his sudden and complete turnaround, I mumbled something about needing to spend time with Omma while she was up and semi-alert enough to eat her breakfast.
He accepted this, but then several hours later, he found me in Omma’s disused office, searching her papers for Mrs. Prado’s number.
His consulting client rescheduled on him and he was free to pick Lily up from school.
He invited me to join him, and thus was the story of how I ended up in the Lantana Little Learners parking lot watching married women flirt with my sister’s widower.
You’d have thought I’d have spent that time crafting the very clear and direct speech I’d give to him, Rhodes, and Alex on how it was best they consider their physical relationship with Sue terminated, just like they considered their marriage to her terminated.
There would be no sex with her—or anyone who may happen to look like her—at all. Ever.
Yes, you’d have thought I’d have that speech ready to go...
One of the women said something, and Micah threw his head back laughing.
His long, thick hair caught the wind, which tried to carry it away—taking it only so far as the strong, warm hands that captured, then smoothed it down, would let it.
Without his hair hiding his cheeks, they revealed the deep, teasing dimple above his chiseled jaw.
...but you’d be wrong.
Did normal women turn down a wild romp from a hot single man when it was offered up on a silver platter? Because I had a feeling that answer was no, and they’d say as much in the jury room when they’re deliberating over my fraud case.
“That’s just too much damn fucking fine to say no to.”
“Excuse me?”
I jumped. “What! Hello?”
“Hello?”
“Mrs. Prado?” I asked, recovering quick. “Hi, this is Ms. Kim—”
“I know who this is.”
I blinked, wondering if I mistook the chill in her tone. “Yes... uh... thank you for taking my call. Do you have a few minutes to talk?”
“About?”
“About possibly coming back to work for—”
“Excuse me? Coming back to work? For you? You must be joking. This is a joke, and not one that has the decency to be funny.”
Okay, I didn’t imagine the chill.
“How dare you waste my time with this non—?”
“I’m sorry,” I blurted. “I’m so sorry for everything I’ve done and said. Sorry for mistreating you and pretending for even a second that you’re not the best chef and house manager that anyone could ask for.”
“I... What?” The wind whooshed out of her rant. “Who is this?”
“You know who this is,” I replied, skirting around the question. “And you know I don’t give apologies easily.”
She snorted.
“Or at all,” I rushed to say. “But this one I owe you. I’m sorry, Mrs. Prado, please, hear me out.”
“Hmm.” Only she could infuse a hum with suspicion. “Five minutes.”
“That’s all I need.” I clapped my hands, waving them at the sky and sending my thanks to Hera. “Because I’m going to get straight to the point. The manor’s become a shitpit and I need your help restoring it to its former glory.”
Another hum. “A shitpit sounds about right,” said the fifty-eight-year-old woman. “And needing my help is accurate too, but why in the world would I come back?”
“I—” I halted, cringing. “I want to say for a substantial raise, but I... I don’t have any money to pay you.”
She scoffed. “What else is new? Since when have you ever had, or been willing to part, with a single cent?”
I deflated like an old balloon. I was forced to learn how to cook and clean after being kicked out of my fancy life, but that didn’t mean I was prepared to cook for an entire family three times a day, or clean a manor bigger than my old apartment building.
And that didn’t begin to account for all the yardwork that needed to be done.
“But you didn’t pay me before, so there’s no need to start now.”
“What?” My ears pricked up. “What do you mean I don’t need to start paying you?”
“I will submit my pay stubs to the estate, Soo Min, obviously.” Exasperation laced her tone. “As I did before. With the exception that these pay stubs will reflect a sixty percent rise in pay. Yes?” she snapped.
“Yes,” I said instantly, tossing another thank-you to the heavens. “With a bonus thrown in if you handle the hiring and interviewing of the rest of the staff we’ll need. Groundspeople, gardeners, housekeepers, painters, roofers, and an interior designer or two? Please,” I threw in.
“Three thousand.”
“Twenty-five hundred and I throw in a kitchen remodel.”
“Deal,” she pounced. “If you write up the contract with those terms and send it to me signed by your mother, the accountant, and the estate lawyer by the end of the week, I’ll start the following Sunday.”
“Absolutely. Not a problem.”
“Then I’ll see you Sunday.”
Click.
I jumped up and down—doing my flat-ass dance right there in the parking lot.
I was all prepared for a very awkward conversation with Rhodes, Alex, and Micah on their need to fund the household staff, but it never occurred to me that wasn’t necessary because it was all handled by Appa’s estate planning and lawyers.
And that didn’t occur to me because I never really understood how all of that worked in the first place.
What I did know was that my father, Jong Woo Kim, was the heir to a mini-fan empire based in Korea.
As the second son, he didn’t inherit the business from his father, but he did reap the rewards with a sizeable bank account gifted to him upon marriage.
And therefore, Omma was gifted a sizeable prenuptial agreement on her wedding day.
Neither one of them shared the details of that prenup with me or Sue growing up, naturally, so we got the skinny from our cousins in Daegu one summer when we visited for a wedding.
Our older cousin, daughter of my father’s sister, told us that Dad’s older brother made his new wife sign a prenup too, but it wasn’t “half as vicious as the one Omma signed.”
We didn’t know what she was talking about, but when we asked her, she just said, “If you don’t know, I’m not going to be the one to tell you, but I will say this.
If a guy handed me a prenup like that minutes before we were supposed to get married, and he told me to either sign it or walk out, I’d walk out. .. after kicking his ass.”
Naturally, Sue and I were bursting with questions after being told that, but neither one of us was stupid enough to ask our parents about it.
We both wanted to live.
But the questions always hung in the air, especially after Appa died.
Our standard of living didn’t change at all.
We still had nice clothes, expensive shoes, and a house full of staff, but after middle school, and the declaration that I would run away before I ever went to the same school as Sue again, I put the Titan Prep brochure in my mother’s hands.
She agreed that it was a great school and I’d do very well there, but then she said something I didn’t understand until that moment.
“I don’t know if he’ll approve the tuition cost when there are other private schools in the area that cost half this much,” she had said, clearly forgetting I was in the room. “I’m still paying back Halmeoni’s surgery too.”
I asked her then what she was talking about, and she immediately shooed me away and told me to start on my homework.
Mrs. Prado’s remark now put all of that in sharp focus. If my mother needed joint permission from an accountant and a lawyer just to hire a flipping house manager, it meant that my father locked his inheritance down so tight, my mother couldn’t touch it even after he died.
Imagine how humiliating it must have been for my mother to have to go pleading and cajoling for the money to send her daughter to a better school? And then quadruple that humiliation when she begged him for money to care for her ailing mother, and he told her she could only have it as a loan.
From her father’s control, to her husband’s control, and now to a lawyer’s control—my mother wasn’t allowed independence a single day of her life... and now that life was ending.