Chapter 4 #2
“She’s diagnosing me. A woman who has never seen my face is recommending I get therapy based on whatever bullshit he fed her.”
“She thinks she’s helping,” Kellee says. Her grip tightens on the back of my chair. “She genuinely believes—”
“I don’t care what she believes. He built this. Text by text. He dripped poison into her ear until she’d say exactly what he needed to hear.”
I scroll faster. The custody talk sharpens. My lawyer says I need to keep documenting. Then—I keep a log. Dates, incidents, her behavior. It feels awful but I have to protect Audrey.
A log.
He’s been keeping a log.
Somewhere in this house—on his phone, in an app, in that locked filing cabinet I’ve never opened—there’s a list. Every time I cried.
Every dark circle under my eyes. Every dirty dish.
He’s been turning the worst months of my life into a paper trail.
Cataloging my exhaustion like evidence. Weaponizing the fact that I was drowning while he was eating dinner with his girlfriend and kissing her in parking garages.
My hands are curled into fists on the keyboard. The knuckles are still red from hitting Carter’s desk and I’m glad—I want to hit something else. I want to put my fist through this laptop screen. I want to walk into Drew’s office and slam this computer on his desk and watch his face cave in.
Then the ring text.
Drew’s gray bubble. The words land before my brain is ready.
It was my grandmother’s—she wore it for 52 years. I want you to have it.
Fifty-two years.
The ring is seven years old. I was there when Francis’s father sketched it.
I held both stones in my palm—the diamond warm from my grandmother’s jewelry box, the sapphire cool from Drew’s.
Seven years. He invented forty-five more.
He erased my grandmother. Just—deleted her.
Scratched her out like a line through a name on a list and replaced her with no one.
A ghost woman wearing a ghost ring for five fake decades.
Patty’s reply: Drew. I’m crying. Are you serious? This is the most beautiful thing anyone’s ever done for me.
Heart emojis. Then a photo—my ring on her hand, her nails dark red, held up to catch the light.
The rainbow.
My grandmother’s diamond throws a tiny rainbow in direct light.
Something about the old cut, the angle of the facets.
She held that stone against the hospital window when my mother was dying.
I was eleven, standing in the doorway. The rainbow crawled across the white ceiling tiles and my mother smiled—the last real smile I ever saw from her—and my grandmother’s hand shook but she kept holding it there until the sun moved and the light faded and my mother closed her eyes.
Drew knows this. I told him on our third date and he held both my hands and his eyes went wet and he said that’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever heard.
He took the most sacred thing I carry and he memorized it and then he gutted it and gave the scraps to a stranger.
He handed another woman my grandmother’s diamond and invented a dead woman to explain it and she cried because she thought it was beautiful and it IS beautiful, it’s the most beautiful thing I own, and he STOLE it—
“He erased your grandmother.” Kellee’s voice breaks. “He just—wrote her out.”
I can’t breathe. My chest is locked and my jaw is wired shut and the kitchen is too bright and too loud—the refrigerator humming, Audrey smacking the high chair, the banana smell mixing with cold coffee—and my eyes are burning but I will not cry.
Drew documented my tears. He logged them.
He used them as proof that I was falling apart. I will not give him one more drop.
I bite the inside of my cheek until the copper taste floods my tongue. The pain clears my head. Sharpens everything back to edges.
My phone is in my hand. Screenshot the ring text. The custody messages. The log. My thumb moves across the screen—fast, steady, precise—and every image saves clean. Each one is a weapon he built and left lying around because he never thought I’d pick them up.
Kellee watches me work. When I close the laptop and push it to the middle of the table, she folds her hands together.
“What do you want to do?”
Audrey bangs her palms on the tray. Banana in her eyebrows.
One sock gone. She’s trying to grab a Cheerio with her whole fist and getting furious about it because she hasn’t figured out her fingers yet.
Eight months old. She doesn’t know her father started planning to take her away from me before she had a heartbeat.
“I want to be in the room when he can’t lie his way out.”
“What room?”
“Somewhere public. Full of people. I want him to trot out the she’s not well line and I want every person in that room to be looking at proof that he’s a thief and a liar and a fraud.”
“That’s not a courtroom.”
“A courtroom lets him rehearse. His lawyer coaches the face. He practices the voice.” I press my thumb into my bare ring finger. The groove is almost gone. “I want the second it hits him. I want to be standing right there when he realizes it’s over and there’s nowhere to go.”
Audrey drops the Cheerio and bangs again. I set three more in front of her. She grabs one with her fist and shoves it against her mouth.
“Her engagement party,” I say. “Two and a half weeks. Rooftop restaurant.”
Kellee’s eyebrows lift. “You’ve been watching her page.”
“Every single day.”
She exhales hard through her nose. Looks at Audrey. Looks at me. Something shifts behind her eyes—not hesitation. Decision.
“Then we figure out how to get you through that door.”