Chapter 3
For the next ten minutes, Tabitha performed like she was up for an Academy Award.
She sobbed.
She trembled.
She told Robin over and over that I had baited her, taunted her, whispered terrible things about her under my breath the whole afternoon, pushed her until she had snapped.
“I was so stressed about the wedding,” she wailed, dabbing at her eyes with a crumpled tissue she had pulled from her sleeve. “And then this woman — this stranger — kept making these little comments, these sly little digs about how I was just a gold digger, how I didn’t deserve you, how you’d never actually marry someone like me — I just lost my temper, Robin, that’s all, I’m only human —”
I leaned against the hall table, my arms crossed, the recorder still in my hand, and let her talk.
The more she said, the deeper she dug her own grave.
Because she was describing a version of me that did not exist.
A cruel, petty, small-minded woman who would spend an afternoon taunting a housekeeper just to make her miserable.
And Robin knew me.
He had been raised by me.
He had watched me sit for hours with grieving families through the foundation.
He had watched me stay up all night packing care packages for single mothers when the economy crashed.
He had watched me treat every single person who crossed our threshold — from heads of state to the kid who mowed our lawn — with exactly the same courtesy.
I saw the moment he realized it.
His shoulders slumped.
The hand he had resting on Tabitha’s back slipped away.
“Stop it,” he said quietly.
She froze mid-sentence.
“Darling?”
“I said stop it,” Robin repeated. He looked at her, really looked at her, and for the first time I think he saw what the rest of us had been seeing for months. “You’re lying. You’re lying and you don’t even know how obvious it is. My mother would never — she would never say the things you’re claiming. She wouldn’t. Not to anyone. Least of all someone working in our house.”
Tabitha’s face hardened.
The sweet, wounded fiancée vanished.
In her place stood a woman I recognized from the last three hours — sharp, angry, dangerous when cornered.
“Oh, please,” she sneered, and the change was so fast it was almost impressive. “You really are as naive as everyone says, aren’t you? She has you wrapped around her little finger, always has. You’re thirty-two years old and you still run to Mommy every time someone tells you something you don’t want to hear.”
She turned to me.
“Fine. So I was a little sharp with the help. Big deal. They’re paid to take it. That’s the whole point of having staff, isn’t it? You pay them, they do what you tell them, they don’t complain. You act like I beat her or something. I poured a little water on her. Boo hoo. She’ll dry.”
I felt Robin go rigid beside me.
“Tabitha,” he said, his voice dangerously low.
“What?” she snapped, whirling on him. “Oh, don’t give me that look. You knew exactly who I was when you proposed. You loved that I was ambitious, that I knew what I wanted. You loved that I wasn’t like all those boring, simpering girls your mother kept trying to set you up with. Well, this is the other side of that, Robin. People who get what they want in this world don’t waste time being nice to people who don’t matter.”
She pointed a red-taloned finger at me.
“And she doesn’t matter. Not really. She’s just an old woman with too much money and too much time on her hands who can’t stand the thought of her little boy finally growing up and leaving her.”
She took a step toward me.
Her eyes were black with rage.
“Now you listen to me, Mrs. Harrington,” she said, her voice low and vicious. “You are going to delete that recording. You are going to apologize to me. And you are going to sit down, shut up, and let us get married in peace. Because if you don’t — if you so much as breathe a word of this ridiculous little stunt to anyone — I will make it my life’s mission to destroy you. I will tell every newspaper, every gossip site, every charity board you sit on that you abused me. That you hated me for being younger and prettier and loved by your son. That you hit me, that you threatened me, that you did everything in your power to break us up. And do you know what? People will believe me. Because I’m young. I’m pretty. And I’m very, very good at crying on cue. Your reputation will be in tatters. Your foundation will lose every donor it has. And your precious son? He’ll be forced to choose between the woman he loves and the mother who ruined everything. And I will make sure he chooses me.”
She smiled.
It did not reach her eyes.
“Because I always win.”
I looked at Robin.
His face was ashen.
He looked like someone had just reached inside his chest and ripped his heart out.
I reached out and touched his arm.
“Robin,” I said softly. “Do you want to hear the recording?”
He nodded.
May you like
He could not speak.
I pressed play.
