Chapter 2 - The Flash Drive
Standing near the DJ booth, I felt my knees buckle. My hand flew to my chest, my fingernails digging into the thin navy fabric of my discount department store dress.
*Dad’s secret second will.*
The words thundered in my head like church bells during an air raid. Five years ago, when our father died of a sudden coronary arrest, Vanessa and our mother had produced a will drafted just three weeks prior. It had left everything—the seaside estate, the investment portfolios, the trust funds—exclusively to Vanessa and Mom. I had been left with five thousand dollars and our father’s antique leather desk. When I had questioned it, my mother had slapped me across the face and accused me of being a greedy vulture.
I had spent five years working seventy-hour weeks, teaching thirty chaotic eight-year-olds by day, grading essays by night, and rationing Lily’s inhalers when the insurance copays skyrocketed.
And all of it was a lie.
“Lily,” I choked out, rushing up the steps of the DJ platform. My hands were shaking uncontrollably as I wrapped my arms around her narrow shoulders. “Lily, baby... where did you get that?”
Lily didn’t cry. She stood tall in her pale yellow cardigan, her small chest rising and falling rhythmically. Her deep hazel eyes—so much like my father’s—stared down at her aunt with an eerie, ancient calm.
“She left her iPad at Grandma’s house last Sunday, Mom,” Lily whispered, her small hand gripping mine with terrifying strength. “She told me to carry her bags to the trunk. Her phone was syncing to her cloud drive. It popped up on the screen while I was holding it. She forgot to lock it.”
Lily looked down at the platform, her voice catching for only a fraction of a second. “I watched it in the bathroom. And then I heard Aunt Vanessa tell Grandma in the hallway that she was going to have child protective services look into us so you’d lose custody, just to keep you from ever showing your face at high-society events again.”
Tears burned the backs of my eyelids, not of weakness, but of pure, molten fury. A mother can endure being starved, humiliated, and shoved to the back of the room. But when you threaten her child, every civilized instinct evaporates.
“You little b*tch!”
The scream shattered the ballroom’s trance.
Vanessa was lunging. She ripped the bottom hem of her $25,000 gown, tearing the hand-sewn lace completely free as she charged toward the DJ booth like a rabid animal. Her veil tore off her head, catching on a towering glass centerpiece and dragging three hundred white roses and a cascading pillar of water crashing down onto Table Two.
“Give me that drive!” Vanessa shrieked, her manicured acrylic nails curved like talons aimed directly at my eight-year-old daughter’s face. “You ruined my life! You ruined everything, you little parasite!”
I didn’t think. Maternal adrenaline turned my limbs to steel.
Before Vanessa could lay a single finger on the stairs, I stepped directly in front of Lily, planted my feet, and threw my entire body weight forward.
My forearm caught Vanessa squarely across the chest.
The impact knocked the breath from her lungs. She stumbled backward in her four-inch Jimmy Choo heels, lost her footing on the wet marble, and fell hard on her back right into the puddle of shattered glass and spilled champagne.
Gasps erupted from the crowd.
May you like
“Don’t you touch my daughter,” I snarled, my voice echoing through the ballroom with an authority I hadn’t felt in ten years. “You step one foot closer to her, Vanessa, and I won’t need a video to finish you.”
***
