Chapter 3: What the Family Never Wanted Me to Know
I stood very still.
Andrew was watching me the way a man watches a door he isn't sure he should have opened.
"What are you talking about?" I said.
He sat down on the edge of the couch.
Ran both hands through his hair.
For the first time since I'd known him, he looked like he didn't know what to say next.
"My father," he started.
Then stopped.
"Andrew."
"My father isn't just a businessman, Alice.
The company — it's not clean.
It hasn't been for a long time."
I didn't move.
"What does that mean?"
"It means there are people involved who don't ask questions.
People who don't like complications.
And my parents — when they found out about your kids, about how many there were, about your situation — they said it was too visible.
Too much attention.
They don't want anything that draws scrutiny."
I stared at him.
"You're telling me your parents run a crjme operation and they rejected my children because five kids would attract too much attention?"
He flinched at the word.
"I'm telling you it's complicated."
"It's not complicated," I said.
"It's disgusting."
He stood up fast.
"Keep your voice down."
"Don't tell me to keep my voice down in my own home."
He crossed the room and stood close — too close.
"Alice, I'm trying to warn you.
If you push back on my parents, if you make this difficult, they won't just walk away.
They'll make sure you regret it."
My hands were steady.
I was surprised by that.
"Is that a threat, Andrew?"
"It's a fact."
I looked at him for a long moment.
The man I thought I knew.
The man who had sat at my kitchen table and helped my youngest with a puzzle.
The man who had held my hand at my husband's grave when I'd taken him there once, early in our relationship, because I'd wanted him to understand who I was and where I came from.
"Get out," I said.
"Alice—"
"Get out of my house."
He grabbed his jacket from the chair.
At the door he turned back, and his voice had gone flat and cold in a way I hadn't heard before.
"You don't know what you're starting.
My parents will bury you."
The door closed.
I sat down on the floor right where I was standing.
Not because my legs gave out.
Because I needed to be low and still and close to something solid.
My phone was in my hand.
I didn't call my mother.
I didn't call a friend.
I opened the notes app and started writing down every word Andrew had just said.
Date, time, exact phrasing.
The threat.
The admission about the company.
All of it.
I had learned one thing in the years since my husband passed: when someone shows you who they are, you write it down before the shock wears off and memory starts softening the edges.
When I finished, I sat there in the quiet.
Five children asleep upstairs.
One woman on the floor of her living room with a phone full of notes and an engagement ring still on her finger.
I looked at the ring for a moment.
Then I set the phone face-down on the carpet and took the ring off.
I placed it on the coffee table.
I didn't throw it.
I didn't cry.
I just set it down the way you set down something that no longer belongs to you.
I thought the worst was behind me.
I was wrong.
My phone lit up at 11:47 that night.
Not Andrew.
A number I didn't recognize.
I almost didn't answer.
The voice on the other end was a woman.
Older.
Careful with her words in the way people are when they've rehearsed what they're going to say.
"Alice?
My name is Patricia Holt.
May you like
I think we need to meet.
I know what the Mercer family is capable of — and I know what they're planning to do to you."
