Then, a few months ago, Jesse brought home Dominic Cross.
Tall. Handsome. Perfect teeth. A heavy gold watch he said was a gift from “a client.”
A firm handshake, and a smile that never once reached his eyes.
Every question slid off him.
Where’d you grow up? “All over.” Parents? “This and that.” Work? “I consult.”
But Jesse glowed when Dominic entered a room, so I swallowed every instinct I had and told myself I was just an overprotective mother.
I was not being overprotective.
I was being exactly protective enough, and I almost talked myself out of it.
Chapter 3: The Last Stall
The wedding was at a lakeside lodge outside Breck Falls, Wisconsin.
White chairs, lights in the oaks, my son happier than I had ever seen a human being.
If he’s happy, I’m happy, I told myself, over and over, like a woman trying to believe her own instincts were wrong.
Halfway through the reception, I slipped down the hall to the big shared restroom to fix my mascara.
That’s when I heard the laugh from the last stall.
Low. Private. And instantly familiar, because it was Dominic.
On the phone.
“Relax,” he was saying. “It’s done. The papers are signed. He signed everything at the rehearsal dinner without even reading it.”
My hand froze halfway to my face.
Then he said a name that turned my bl*od to ice water.
“Roy.”
I told myself it was a coincidence. There are a million men named Roy.
Then something clattered in the stall — the phone — and the call jumped to speaker, and a voice filled that tiled room.
Gravelly. Older. With that same lazy drawl dragging the end of every sentence.
“You hear me, kid?”
Twenty years fell away in one second.
It was Roy.
My son’s father, who vanished before Jesse was born, on the phone with my son’s husband, on my son’s wedding day.
Dominic grabbed for the phone, but not fast enough, and I heard the five words that made everything horribly, finally clear.
“His mother owns it all.”
Not Jesse. Me.
They’d married my son to get at the company — and somewhere along the way they’d realized the real prize wasn’t his to give, because it was mine.
I did not scream.
I did not throw open that stall.
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