Exactly five days after an emergency C-section that Grant hadn’t even bothered to show up for, I took a taxi home from the hospital holding our newborn daughter Maisie against my chest, my stitches throbbing with every step the doctor had warned me not to take, and walked in to find a strange woman’s silver heels by the stairs, my cream silk robe on the marketing consultant he’d hired six months earlier, and Grant acting like I was the one who’d rudely interrupted something important.

Eli walked them to the door.

I heard Sienna screaming the whole way, calling Grant a liar, a loser, a fraud. I heard Grant yelling back that she was the one who’d ruined everything, that she’d seduced him. I heard Vivian wailing about how unfair life was, how her son deserved better than a “cold-hearted gold digger” like me.

Then the front door slammed.

Silence.

I sank down onto the nearest chair, my stitches screaming, and let the tears come.

Maisie fussed in my arms, sensing my distress, and I held her tighter, rocking her back and forth, whispering apologies into her hair.

“I’m so sorry, baby girl,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry you got stuck with a dad like that. I’m so sorry you had to see all that. I promise you, I will never let anyone hurt you like that again. Never.”

Eli came back into the kitchen a minute later. He didn’t say anything. He just poured me a glass of water, handed me a box of tissues, and sat down across from me.

We sat like that for a long time.

When I finally stopped crying, I wiped my face and looked at him.

“How did Dad know?” I asked. “How did he know Grant would turn out like this?”

Eli sighed, leaning back in his chair.

“Your dad was a lot of things, Lila. But stupid wasn’t one of them. He saw how Grant looked at you when you were working that coffee shop. He saw the way he’d brag about his ‘big plans’ every time he came over for dinner. He saw that Grant loved the idea of you more than he loved you. The idea of a pretty, quiet wife who’d never question him. Who’d let him take all the credit.”

He paused, looking at Maisie.

“He set up the holding company because he wanted you to have an out. If Grant was a good man, you’d never need to use it. You’d live happily ever after, run the company together, raise your kids. If he wasn’t… you wouldn’t be stuck. You wouldn’t have to choose between staying in a bad marriage and being homeless with a baby.”

I thought about my dad. He’d died two years ago, heart attack in his sleep. I’d been so angry at him at the time for “controlling” my life, for making me live that year as a barista, for hiding the holding company from me.

Now I’d give anything to hug him one more time.

“Did he know about Sienna?” I asked.

Eli nodded. “We got the first audit flag in April. I almost called you then. But your dad’s will said I couldn’t interfere unless you asked me to. Or unless Grant did something so unforgivable there was no going back.” He looked at the missed call log still open on my phone, the nineteen calls from the OR. “This qualifies.”

I picked Maisie up, burped her, and laid her in her bassinet by the kitchen table. She was asleep almost instantly, her little chest rising and falling.

“What happens now?” I asked.

“Now,” Eli said, closing his briefcase, “we clean up the mess. I’ll have the locks changed in two hours. The security system will be active by tonight. Tomorrow, we fire Grant from Veridian, effective immediately. We freeze all Ashford accounts he has access to. We press charges against Sienna for embezzlement. And we start the divorce process.”

“Custody?” My voice cracked on the word.

Eli reached across the table and covered my hand with his.

“Lila, listen to me. You have a perfect record. No drugs. No alcohol. You’re the sole provider. You have a stable home. Grant has a history of infidelity, he abandoned you during a medical emergency, he’s been living off your money for years, and now he’s facing possible criminal charges for covering up Sienna’s embezzlement. He will never get full custody. He’ll be lucky if he gets supervised visits once a month.”

I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

That night, I locked every door and window in the house. I checked the security cameras three times before I went to bed. I brought Maisie’s bassinet right next to my side of the bed, so close I could reach out and touch her any time I wanted.

I didn’t sleep much.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Grant’s face. I saw Vivian’s cold eyes. I saw Sienna in my robe, smirking at me.

Around three in the morning, I heard voices downstairs.

I froze.

My heart hammered in my chest. I reached for the phone on my nightstand, my fingers shaking, and turned the volume all the way down on the baby monitor.

The voices were coming from the living room.

It was Grant and Vivian.

I must have forgotten to lock the guest suite door. They’d snuck back in through the side entrance.

I climbed out of bed as quietly as I could, wincing at the pain in my stomach, and tiptoed to the bedroom door. I pressed my ear against the wood.

“—we can’t just leave, Mom,” Grant was saying. “That money is mine. That company is mine. She tricked me. She lied about who she was.”

“Of course she did,” Vivian hissed back. “Gold-digging little whore. Just like her mother. We have to fight this. We can’t let her get away with it.”

“How? Eli has all the papers. The lawyers say—”

“Forget the lawyers. We take the baby.”

My blood ran cold.

“What?” Grant’s voice was shocked. “Mom, we can’t kidnap her. That’s a felony—”

“Not kidnap. Custody. We go to family court first thing Monday morning. We tell them she’s suffering from severe postpartum depression. We tell them she’s been neglecting the baby. We tell them she’s violent, that she threatened to kill herself and the child. We have witnesses. The cleaning lady will say anything for five hundred bucks. Sienna will testify too, once we tell her we’ll drop the embezzlement charges if she helps us.”

There was a pause.

Then Grant said, “Would that work?”

“Of course it would work,” Vivian said, her voice smug. “Judges always favor the father’s family in these cases. Especially when the mother is a crazy, rich heiress who hid her money from her poor, hardworking husband. We get temporary custody first. Then we drag the case out for years. She’ll get sick of fighting. She’ll give us the house, the company, everything, just to get the baby back.”

I didn’t wait to hear any more.

I tiptoed back to the bed, grabbed my phone, and hit record. I held it up to the door, my hand so tight my knuckles turned white, and recorded every word they said for the next ten minutes.

When they finally stopped talking and went back to the guest suite, I ended the recording and saved it to three different places: my phone, my cloud, and a secure folder Eli had set up for me.

Then I called him.

He answered on the second ring, sounding wide awake.

“Lila? What’s wrong?”

“They’re still here,” I whispered, looking at the bedroom door like it might burst open at any second. “They’re in the guest suite. They’re planning to take Maisie. They’re going to say I have postpartum depression, that I’m unfit. I recorded it. All of it.”

Eli was quiet for two seconds. Then he said, “I’m calling the police. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Lock your bedroom door. Push the dresser in front of it. Don’t open it for anyone except me or the cops. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Lila?”