Chapter 75
Six Weeks Later
Traci was loading groceries into her car when she glanced across the street and spotted the black Porsche. It was parked in a handicapped parking space. Typical.
She was waiting, leaning against the hood of his car, when Ric Eddings emerged from the liquor store with what she assumed was a handle of scotch wrapped in a brown paper sack.
He clicked the remote to unlock the Porsche, ignoring her presence. He tried to step past her, but she didn’t budge, deliberately blocking access in the narrow slot.
“Do you mind?” He was looking up the street, shifting from one foot to the other, impatient to get away, either from the parking services officer, whose light utility vehicle was paused up the street a block away, or from Traci.
“Actually, I do. I’ve been calling and texting for the past six weeks. We need to talk, Ric.”
He scowled. “I’ve got nothing to say to you. Or your little protégé.”
“Are you referring to Olivia? Your half sister?”
“Get away from me,” Ric said, deliberately hip-checking her. She bumped him back hard, apparently catching him off guard, because he went sprawling onto the asphalt road.
He scrambled to his feet, his face flushed with a mixture of rage and embarrassment. “You fucking bitch. I’ll see you and your scammer friend in court. I don’t care how long it takes. She’s not getting a dime of the old man’s money.”
Traci cocked her head to get a good look at him. His nose was bulbous, the veins enlarged, and the whites of his eyes were yellowish. He’d lost weight and his expensive golf clothes hung off his formerly stocky frame. His hair needed cutting, and he’d started growing a patchy beard, which was coming in gray. He was aging before her eyes.
“Hope you hired a better lawyer than that hack you got to draw up that last will of Fred’s,” she taunted.
“You’re the worst thing that ever happened to my family,” Ric said, turning back to the Porsche. “Now get the fuck out of my way.”
She was unmoved by her brother-in-law’s hostility. “You’d like to blame everything that’s happened on me, wouldn’t you? But here’s the thing, Ric.”
She tapped his chest with her forefinger, and he slapped her hand away, but she was undeterred.
“You are the architect of all your own misfortune. You screwed around on Madelyn, so she screwed around on you with Garrett as payback because she knew that prenup meant she’d get nothing if she left the marriage. You tried to screw me over by having your father’s will rewritten, but all you managed to do was screw yourself—because you didn’t know you had a secret half sister.”
“Don’t!” Ric said, his voice sharp.
“You can deny it all you want, but there’s a paternity test that says otherwise. Madelyn found it, and the NDA that Fred forced Shannon to sign, when she was packing up to move him out of the big house. So she came up with a plan to erase Livvy from the Eddings family picture. Instead, she managed to kill the only thing you ever truly loved. Parrish.”
At the mention of his daughter’s name, Ric reached past Traci and grabbed the Porsche’s door handle. But Traci stood her ground.
“You can’t scare me off, and you can’t screw me over anymore, Ric. I’m going to see to it that your old man and you finally do right by Olivia. You want to drag things out in a long court battle, have at it. You’ll end up just like Fred. Rich, yeah. But sick and bitter. And alone.”
He was facing Traci now, his back to the street, so he didn’t see the meter maid, who’d alighted from her vehicle and was approaching with a gleam in her eye and a ticket book in her hand.
“I’ll never stop missing Hoke or Parrish. They’ll always be a part of my life. But they’re the past, and I’m choosing to move ahead.” She turned to go back to her car, and Ric started to say something.
“Sir?”
He turned to see the meter maid, scribbling something on her pad.
“I was just leaving,” he protested.
She ripped the ticket from the pad and handed it over. “Take this with you. Five-hundred-dollar fine for parking in a handicapped space.”