Chapter 3

I have a rule I learned at thirty-one, standing in a bank office being told a woman with a dead husband was "a credit risk."

Never let them see the first crack.

"No," I said.

Just that. Quietly.

Skye blinked. I don't think anyone had said that word to her in four years.

"No?"

"No, I won't be signing my company to you. No, I won't be your live-in help. And no, I won't be apologizing for kissing my grandson."

That's when she started screaming.

I can't reproduce all of it. It came fast, the way it comes out of people who rehearse in the shower. Controlling. Narcissist. Trauma. Emotionally incestuous. At some point she said the word divorce and Grant went gray.

He crouched at her knees, cooing, stroking her hair — and then he turned his head and looked at me with pure loathing.

"Why do you always have to do this?"

"Grant—"

"I told you in the car she was fragile right now. Did you hear a word I said?" He stood up. "Apologize. Now."

"For what, exactly?" My voice came out steady and that scared me more than shouting would have. "For paying for this apartment? For the doula she fired? For nine seconds?"

Skye stood, hurled a throw pillow at the wall, and slammed the bedroom door hard enough to rattle the windows.

And my son — the boy who fell asleep on my chest through four hundred nights of colic, who I taught to tie a tie because his father wasn't there to do it — put both hands on my back and walked me to the front door.

"I should never have brought you here."

"Grant."

"You got rained on by Grandma, I get it, but that doesn't mean you get to rip the umbrella out of everyone else's hands."

The door shut.

I was standing in the hallway in my stocking feet. My shoes were by their couch. My bag was on their counter. My coat was on their chair.

I knocked.

The penthouse hallway is very quiet and their door is very thick. The only reason I could hear her was that she was standing directly against it, shouting toward me on purpose.

"That's your mother? That's the woman?"

"Skye, keep your voice down—"

"Why? I want her to hear! Single mother, never remarried, twenty-two years — you think that's normal? You think that's grief? She stopped seeing you as a son a long time ago, Grant. You're a replacement. Why do you think she flew eleven hours for a baby that isn't hers?"

I put my palm flat against the door.

"And the nine seconds — that was deliberate. She kissed his face on camera to mark him. To show my audience whose he really is."

I pressed my thumb to the smart lock.

It flashed red. Please try again.

The video doorbell chimed on, and her voice came through the speaker, sugared with victory.

"Did you seriously just try my lock? Did you think I'd let another woman keep the code to my home?"

"Skye, it's midnight. Give me my shoes."

"Here's the thing, Nora. You have five minutes to leave or I'm calling the police and telling them a woman is trying to break into a home with a newborn in it. Do you know what that looks like on camera?"

And my son's voice, exhausted, faraway:

"Mom, just go home. You made this worse by touching the lock. That's a boundary. Just go."

So I went.

I rode the elevator to P3 and stood on freezing concrete in my stockings and called my driver and waited twenty-two minutes.

I wasn't angry. That's what I keep trying to explain to people. I wasn't angry at all.

I was cold, in a place the parking garage couldn't reach.

In the back of the car, I called Priya, my assistant, who has picked up on the first ring for nine years.

"Priya. I need you to freeze everything. The cards, the transfers, the leases, the mortgage autopay. All of it. Tonight."

"...All of it, Nora?"

"All of it."

I hung up.

And my phone buzzed with an alert from my private bank.

DRAW APPROVED — $2,400,000 — LINE OF CREDIT, VANCE BOTANICALS HOLDINGS.

Authorized by: Nora E. Vance.

I had been on a plane and in a hospital and in a parking garage.

I had not authorized anything.