Chapter 3
Ethan didn’t sleep a wink that night. He lay in the dark, one arm draped over Claire’s sleeping form, the other curled around his phone, replaying the few seconds of footage he’d managed to save to the cloud before Margaret could delete it. It wasn’t much—just 47 seconds of her dragging Claire, of the pills in her hand—but it was enough.
Enough to start.
At 5:30 AM, he slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Claire or Noah. He padded downstairs in his socks, quiet as a cat. The house was still dark. Margaret’s bedroom door was closed, but he could hear her soft, even breathing through the wood. She was sleeping like a baby. Like she hadn’t tried to ruin three lives the night before.
Ethan went straight to the security room off the garage. It was a small, windowless closet lined with monitors that fed to every camera on the property—front gate, driveway, back patio, hallways. Every room except the nursery and master bedroom, per Claire’s request when they moved in.
Or so he’d thought.
He typed in his passcode and pulled up the last 24 hours of hallway footage. The timeline jumped. Whole chunks were missing—between 1 AM and 3 AM, the feed was just static. Deleted.
He tried the nursery hallway. Same thing.
Ethan leaned his forehead against the cold monitor screen. Of course she’d deleted it. She’d been living in his house for four months. She knew every code, every camera angle, every blind spot. He’d given her free run of the place. Given her the keys to his kingdom, and she’d used them to build a prison for his wife.
He pulled up the front gate camera instead. Scrolled back three months.
There she was. Margaret. Letting herself in and out at all hours. Meeting a man in a dark sedan by the gate once a week, handing over envelopes of cash. Receiving small white packages in return.
The pills.
Ethan took screenshots of every meeting, every license plate, every time she accepted a package. Saved them to three separate cloud accounts, his personal laptop, and a USB drive he tucked into the lining of his work boot. Paranoid? Maybe. But Margaret Collins didn’t leave loose ends, and neither would he.
When he walked back into the kitchen at 6:30, Margaret was already there. She had pancakes on the griddle, bacon sizzling in a pan, soft jazz playing on the speaker. She was wearing her favorite silk robe, her hair perfectly coiffed, like she was hosting a brunch for the country club instead of living in the same house as the woman she’d tried to destroy.
“Good morning, honey!” she chirped, flipping a pancake high in the air. “I made your favorite—blueberry, extra syrup. Sit, sit. Coffee’s already poured.”
Ethan forced a smile. Sat at the island. Picked up the coffee mug. Black. Just how he liked it. He didn’t drink it.
“Where’s Claire?” Margaret asked, sliding a huge stack of pancakes onto his plate. “Still sleeping? That girl could sleep the day away. Honestly, Ethan, I don’t know how you put up with it. A baby needs a mother who’s awake, you know? Present.”
There it was. The first dig of the day. Soft. Innocent. Planting the seed just like she’d been doing for months.
“Claire’s exhausted,” Ethan said, cutting into a pancake but not taking a bite. “Noah’s been fussy. She’s been up every two hours with him. It’s hard. Postpartum is no joke.”
Margaret’s smile tightened just a fraction. Almost imperceptible. But Ethan saw it. He was seeing everything now.
“Oh, I know all about hard,” she said, sliding a piece of bacon onto her own plate. “I raised you all alone, remember? Your father left when you were five. Worked three jobs just to put food on the table. Never complained. Never laid in bed until noon while my baby cried. Some women just have more grit than others, that’s all.”
She took a dainty bite of bacon, watching him over her fork. Waiting for him to agree. Waiting for him to throw Claire under the bus like he always had.
Ethan pushed his plate away.
“You never told me why Dad left,” he said.
The words hung in the air like smoke.
Margaret’s fork clattered against her plate. Her face went pale for half a second, then snapped back to that perfect, pleasant mask.
“Your father was a weak man,” she said, voice sharp now. Cold. “He couldn’t handle the pressure of a family. Ran off with his secretary and never looked back. I’ve told you this a hundred times, Ethan. Why bring it up now?”
“Just wondering,” Ethan said, standing up. He tossed his napkin on the counter. “Funny, though. I found his old journal in the attic last week. He wrote a lot about you. Said you were… controlling. Said you made his life a living hell. Said you threatened to tell everyone he was embezzling from his own company if he tried to take me with him when he left.”
Margaret stood up so fast her chair scraped the tile. Her eyes were blazing now. The mask was slipping.
“That is a lie,” she hissed. “Your father was a liar and a thief and a drunk. You cannot believe a word that man ever wrote—”
“Relax, Mom,” Ethan said, holding up his hands like he was calming a rabid dog. “I’m just messing with you. I didn’t find any journal. Just wanted to see your reaction.”
He walked to the door, grabbing his suit jacket off the hook.
“I’m going to the office,” he said. “I have a big meeting today. Don’t wait up.”
He was halfway out the door when she called after him.
“Ethan?”
He turned. She was back to smiling now. Sweet. Loving. But her eyes were dead.
“Tell that little wife of yours I’ll be in to check on Noah around ten. She needs her rest. I don’t mind helping.”
Ethan’s hand tightened on the door frame until his nails dug into the wood.
“Sure,” he said. “Whatever you want.”
He drove to the office, but he didn’t go inside. He parked three blocks away and called the only person in the world he knew he could trust.
“Jake? It’s Ethan. I need a favor. The biggest favor of my life. And if you breathe a word of this to anyone, I’ll lose everything. My wife. My son. My whole life.”
Jake was his old college roommate. Now a private investigator with a reputation for finding things people wanted buried. Ten minutes later, he was sliding into the passenger seat of Ethan’s SUV, a coffee in one hand and a notepad in the other.
“Talk,” Jake said.
Ethan told him everything. The camera. The pills. Claire’s condition. The deleted footage. The meetings at the gate. The story about his dad. When he was done, Jake was quiet for a long time, staring out the window.
“Your mom’s a piece of work,” he said finally.
“Understatement of the century,” Ethan said. “I need you to dig up everything you can on her. Every arrest, every ticket, every bad check, every person she’s ever crossed. I need to know who she’s meeting at my gate. I need to know what those pills are. And I need proof. Enough proof to put her away for a long time.”
Jake nodded, scribbling in his notepad.
“Consider it done. But Ethan? You gotta know—if we go after her, she’s gonna fight dirty. She’s gonna come for you. For your company. For every weak spot you got. You ready for that?”
Ethan thought of Claire’s flinch when he’d reached for her hand. Thought of Noah’s tiny wails through the phone. Thought of Margaret’s smile as she held those pills.
“I’m ready,” he said. “Because I’m not just fighting for me. I’m fighting for the only two people in this world that matter. And I will burn everything I own to the ground before I let her win.”
Back at the house, Margaret stood in the kitchen, staring at the pancakes Ethan had left untouched. She picked up his coffee mug, walked to the sink, and poured it down the drain. Then she pulled her phone out of her robe pocket and dialed a number.
It rang twice. A man’s voice answered.
“Change of plans,” Margaret said, her voice low and dangerous. “He’s getting suspicious. We move up the timeline. By the end of the week, Claire Baker Collins will be in a psychiatric ward. And my grandson will be mine.”
She hung up. Smiled at her reflection in the kitchen window.
Ethan thought he was playing her?
May you like
Cute.
She’d been playing this game long before he was born.
