Chapter 5
DOING THE WORK
I open the front door as Claire parks in the driveway. Abby bolts past me before I can grab her. “Aunt Claire! Aunt Claire!”
Claire drops the bag and catches her mid-stride. Swings her up, spins her once, presses her face into Abby’s hair. She meets my eyes over Abby’s shoulder. I shake my head. Not now.
She nods.
Preston is at golf, and a few minutes later Claire is at the table with her hands folded. She’s not checking in. Her jaw is set the way it was in the hospital hallway when the doctor came out about Mom.
I set my laptop between us. My fingers are numb. My chest is so tight I have to breathe through my mouth to get air in.
“I need to show you. Don’t react until I’m done.”
“Okay.”
I press play on the nursery footage. Ana’s voice comes through the laptop speaker—Finally.
I thought she’d never leave—and Claire goes rigid.
Preston walks in. His hands on Ana’s back.
Her arms around his neck. The glider starts rocking.
Mitch starts wailing in the crib three feet away and Preston’s voice, low, bored—he’ll tire himself out—and Claire’s hands are shaking against the table, her whole body vibrating.
“Stop.” Her voice breaks on it. “Sophie. Turn it off.”
Claire stares at the screen and a vein in her temple is pulsing and her breath is coming hard and fast through her nose.
“How long.” Not a question.
“Months. At least.”
I pull up everything else I’ve found, even the things I don’t fully understand yet.
Claire shoves back from the table. She walks to the sink and grips the counter and drops her head between her arms. I can hear her breathing from across the room—ragged, forced, the sound of someone trying very hard not to put a fist through drywall.
“There’s more,” I say.
She turns around. Her face is wet. “Show me.”
I pull up Ana’s reports and pick the worst one.
The playground. The day Abby fell off the monkey bars and I sat on the bench with blood on my fingers, pressing Band-Aids onto her knees while she sobbed into my neck.
I read Ana’s version out loud: Sophie cried for no apparent reason this afternoon.
She was unable to explain what was wrong. The children were confused and upset.
“That’s what she wrote.” My voice is shaking. “While I was holding my kid. While I was putting Band-Aids on her knees. She stood ten feet away and watched me comfort my daughter and then she went home and typed that up like a clinical report.”
Claire sits back down. Her chin is trembling.
“Preston told her to do it.” I pull up his email.
The one I’ve read so many times the words don’t look like words anymore.
Keep documenting. My lawyer says we need six more months of this.
”He’s building a case that I’m unfit. So a judge will hand him custody.
And whoever gets custody controls the company shares. ”
Claire reads the email. Her hand goes over her mouth.
Tears run down her face and drip off her jaw and she doesn’t wipe them.
I’m crying too. My face is burning and my nose is running and I grab her hand across the table and she squeezes until my knuckles grind together and the pain is good because it means she’s here, she’s real, I’m not alone with this anymore.
“He’s trying to take my children, Claire.” My voice cracks wide open. “He’s paying our nanny to make me look crazy so he can take my kids.”
She pulls me out of my chair. I press my face into her shoulder and she holds the back of my head—palm flat, fingers in my hair—and I cry the way I haven’t since the Target parking lot.
Ugly. Gasping. My chest heaving against hers and her shirt getting soaked and my whole body shaking so hard my teeth chatter.
She holds on until the worst of it passes. Then she steps back. Wipes her face with both palms. Presses them hard against her cheeks, holds them there, pushes everything back behind her eyes.
When she drops her hands, her jaw is set and her face has gone flat and cold—the look our mother used to get right before she made a decision nobody was going to talk her out of.
“Okay.” She pulls the laptop toward her. “What does your lawyer need?”
Claire has my laptop and hers open side by side on the kitchen table, building a spreadsheet. Her fingers are moving so fast the keys sound like rain on a window.
“Pull up the bank statements again.” She doesn’t look up from the screen.
I lean over and scroll to the transfers. She starts pulling screenshots into the spreadsheet, her mouth a tight line. My hands are still shaking from crying and I shove them under my thighs so she won’t see.
She stops typing. Turns and looks at me and her eyes are red-rimmed and furious. “You’ve been doing this alone?”
I pick at the edge of my thumbnail. “Colleen said not to tell anyone.”
Claire’s hands drop from the keyboard. She turns and stares at me and her whole face crumples. “I would’ve come sooner.”
My ribs squeeze so tight the air won’t come.
She was four hours away this whole time.
Every night I sat on the bathroom floor with my phone in my hand, I could have called her.
I didn’t because I knew she’d come and I knew if she came I’d fall apart and I couldn’t afford to fall apart.
And now she’s sitting here with her face crumpling and I did that to her.
“I know.” My throat is so swollen I can barely get the words through. “That’s why I didn’t call.”
Her chin trembles. She turns back to the screen and types harder.
She’s cross-referencing everything—camera timestamps against the bank transfers against Ana’s reports.
Two hours in and she’s already finding things I missed.
Transfers that spike around the same dates as Ana’s worst reports.
Payments to the LLC that line up with the camera footage.
She keeps making this tight sound through her nose every time she finds a new connection, like she’s being punched.
Weeks I sat alone at this desk in the dark, scrolling through his bank accounts with my hands shaking, terrified I’d miss something, terrified I’d get caught.
And now my sister is sitting next to me and the spreadsheet is growing and something in my chest is unclenching for the first time since the Target parking lot.
My jaw is aching and my eyes are burning and I have to press my palms flat against my thighs and blink hard because if I start crying again right now I won’t stop.
Claire scrolls through Preston’s calendar, matching meeting blocks against the nursery footage timestamps. She scrolls forward. Stops. Leans closer to the screen.
“What is this?”
I look over her shoulder. A calendar entry three weeks out. Whitfield Country Club. Annual fundraiser. Beside it, a note: Speech draft—confirm with event coordinator.
“He’s getting an award.” My face goes hot and my hands curl into fists against my thighs. “Family Business Leader of the Year. He’s been talking about it for months.”
Claire’s hands go still on the keyboard. She reads the entry again. Her jaw shifts side to side. She clicks back to the spreadsheet without saying a word, but her typing has slowed down.
The garage door rumbles. My stomach drops.
I reach for the laptops but Claire has already closed both of them, stacked them, slid them behind the fruit bowl.
She picks up her coffee mug and leans back in her chair and crosses her legs and she looks like she’s been sitting here doing nothing all afternoon.
Preston walks in with his golf bag over one shoulder, scrolling his phone. “Hey, Claire. Didn’t know you were coming.”
Claire picks up her mug and takes a sip. Casual. Bored. “Surprised my sister. We’re being lazy.”
“Nice.” He opens the fridge. “How’s the drive?”
“Not bad.” She tilts her head at him. “Your putting still terrible?”
He laughs and grabs a water. “Worse. Three-putted the ninth.”
“Tragic.”
My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my wrists.
His cologne hits me from four feet away and underneath it I catch Ana’s perfume—floral, sharp, soaked into his shirt collar.
My stomach heaves. Acid floods the back of my throat and I swallow it down and grip the underside of my chair because he was with her today.
He was with her and now he’s standing in my kitchen smiling at my sister and my skin is crawling and I can’t move.
Claire is smiling at him, asking about his back nine, laughing.
Her hand under the table is gripping my knee so hard her nails are digging through my jeans into skin.
I smile at my husband and nod while he talks about his round.
My face is burning. My teeth are clenched so tight my molars ache and my pulse is thudding in my ears and I hate him.
I hate him so much my hands are shaking under the table and I have to sit on them to keep still.
He goes upstairs. His footsteps cross the landing and the bedroom door closes.
My shoulders drop and the breath I’ve been holding comes out in a rush that makes my whole chest shudder.
My arms feel heavy. My legs feel heavy. Everything feels like it weighs twice what it should and I sag forward in my chair and press my forehead against the edge of the table and just breathe.
The cool wood against my skin. The quiet kitchen.
The sound of my own lungs working without having to perform for anyone.
Claire opens the laptops. Her face is flushed and her fingers are white around the edge of the screen.
“How do you do that every day?” Her voice is hoarse.
I press my hands flat on the table to stop the shaking. “I don’t have a choice.”
She stares at me for a long second. Then she pulls the calendar back up—the fundraiser entry, the date three weeks away. Family Business Leader of the Year. She looks at the screen. Looks back at me. Her eyes are dry now and her jaw is set and there’s something in her face I haven’t seen before.
“Sophie.” She grips the edge of the laptop. “I have an idea.”