Chapter 8
The pancakes were a hit.
Noah ate five.
Emily ate three and wore half of them.
Ethan picked at one.
I drank three cups of coffee.
Black.
No sugar.
At ten o’clock, Danielle showed up.
With Emily’s favorite stuffed rabbit.
And a change of clothes.
And a look on her face that said she’d spent the entire night researching extradition laws.
She walked into the kitchen.
Kissed Emily on the top of the head.
Nodded at me.
Glanced at Ethan.
“Can we talk? Outside. Now.”
Ethan stood up.
“Danielle, I was just about to—”
“Outside. Now.”
Her voice left no room for argument.
Ethan followed her.
I heard the screen door slam.
I turned to the kids.
“Who wants to build a fort in the living room?”
Two hours later.
The fort was built.
The kids were inside watching a movie.
Eating popcorn.
Completely absorbed.
Danielle, Ethan, and I sat around the kitchen table.
The manila envelope was open in the center.
All the papers spread out.
Ethan had talked for ninety minutes straight.
About the embezzlement.
How it had started small.
Five thousand dollars here.
Ten thousand there.
To pay a medical bill for Emily that his insurance wouldn’t cover.
Then the blackmail letters started.
And the amounts got bigger.
And bigger.
Until he was taking a hundred thousand dollars a month.
Just to keep up.
Just to keep his secret.
He told us about the blackmailers.
The texts.
The emails.
The demands.
How they’d threatened to kidnap Emily once.
How he’d paid an extra fifty thousand just to make sure they didn’t.
Danielle had gone pale when he said that.
She’d reached across the table.
Taken my hand.
Squeezed so hard her knuckles turned white.
Ethan told us about the insurance policies.
How he’d taken them out after the kidnapping threat.
If something happened to him, or to us, the kids would be taken care of.
No matter what.
It sounded almost reasonable.
Until you remembered he’d stolen three million dollars to get there.
“I’ve been trying to figure out who they are,” he said. “For two years. I have a list. Three names. People who would have known about Emily. About the money.”
He slid a piece of paper across the table.
Three names typed neatly.
1. Linda Carter (his mother)
2. Richard Voss (his boss)
3. Madison Price (his ex-fiancée)
I stared at the first name.
“Your mother? Ethan, that’s insane. She loves Noah. She loves Emily—even if she didn’t know about her until yesterday. She would never do this.”
“Wouldn’t she?” he said. “She hated you, Sarah. Hated that I married you. Hated that I had Noah with you instead of the ‘nice girl’ she’d picked out for me. And when she found out about Danielle and Emily—she found out a year before you did, by the way—she told me I had to leave both of you. Marry someone ‘appropriate.’ Or she’d tell everyone. I told her to go to hell. Two weeks later, the first blackmail letter arrived.”
I thought about Linda.
Cold.
Controlling.
Obsessed with appearances.
She’d never liked me.
Never thought I was good enough for her precious son.
But blackmail?
Threatening to kidnap her own granddaughter?
That was a whole different level of evil.
“Richard Voss,” Danielle said. “Your boss. Why would he blackmail you? He’s worth two hundred million dollars.”
“Because he’s been embezzling too,” Ethan said. “Fifteen million. Over ten years. I found out by accident four years ago. He promised me a promotion if I kept quiet. Then when I started taking money on my own… he realized he had leverage. And I had leverage on him. It was a stalemate. Until the blackmail started. Every demand I got had details only Richard would know. Details about the company’s internal audits. About when it was safe to take more money.”
I looked at the third name.
“Madison. But you were marrying her. Why would she blackmail you?”
“Because she knew,” Ethan said. “About Danielle. About Emily. She knew six months before the wedding. She told me if I went through with marrying her, she’d never tell anyone. She just wanted the wedding. The ring. The status. But if I ever left her… she’d destroy me. The blackmail demands doubled the week I proposed to her. Tripled the week before the wedding. She was trying to force me to call it off. So she could play the victim and take half of everything in the ‘breakup settlement.’”
Everything was a lie.
Everything.
The wedding.
The proposal.
Madison’s “shock” when she read the note.
She’d known all along.
She’d been in on it.
Or she’d been running it.
“All three of them had motive,” Danielle said. “All three had opportunity. All three knew enough to make the threats credible.”
She looked at Ethan.
“Which one do you think it is?”
He hesitated.
“All of them.”
The room went silent.
“What?” I said.
“Think about it. The demands changed every month. Sometimes they wanted cash. Sometimes wire transfers. Sometimes they threatened to go to you. Sometimes to the police. Sometimes to my boss. It was like three different people were writing the letters. Three different agendas. All feeding off each other. All getting rich while I burned.”
He leaned forward.
“Linda wants me to leave both of you and come back under her thumb. Richard wants me to keep quiet about his embezzlement and take the fall if anyone gets caught. Madison wants money. Status. Revenge. They found out about each other six months ago. Teamed up. That’s when the demands really got crazy.”
It made sense.
Horrible, terrible sense.
Three people.
Each with their own reasons to destroy Ethan.
Each using the others to do it.
And all of them willing to use two innocent children as pawns.
I felt sick.
“So what do we do?” Danielle said. “We can’t go to the police. If we do, Ethan goes to prison. And the blackmailers know it. They’ll just keep demanding more and more until there’s nothing left.”
“Then we don’t go to the police,” I said.
Both of them looked at me.
“What do you mean?” Ethan said.
“I mean we fight fire with fire. They think they have all the power because they know your secrets. But we have secrets too. On all three of them.”
I pointed to the papers.
“Linda has been stealing from your grandfather’s trust fund for twenty years. You told me that once. Five hundred thousand dollars. If we go to the other family members, she loses everything. Her house. Her reputation. Her freedom.”
I pointed to the next name.
“Richard Voss has embezzled fifteen million dollars. We have the records to prove it—you kept copies, right?”
Ethan nodded.
“Every single one.”
“Good. We send those records to the SEC. To the FBI. To every news outlet in Atlanta. Richard Voss spends the rest of his life in a cell smaller than my bathroom.”
I pointed to the last name.
“And Madison. She knew about the embezzlement. Knew about the blackmail. Helped them. That’s conspiracy. Fraud. A dozen other felonies. She goes to prison right along with them.”
Danielle was staring at me.
A slow smile spreading across her face.
“You’re good at this.”
“I had a good teacher,” I said. “Three years of living with a liar teaches you how to spot one. And how to beat one.”
Ethan looked from me to Danielle.
Disbelief on his face.
“You’d really do that? For me?”
“Not for you,” I said. “For Noah. For Emily. For us. These people have been controlling your life for three years. And by extension, ours. It stops. Now. Tomorrow. We hit all three of them at the same time. With everything we’ve got. No warning. No negotiation. Total destruction.”
I stood up.
Leaned over the table.
“But here’s the deal, Ethan. You help us take them down. You testify. You give back every penny you can. And then you turn yourself in. You take your punishment. Whatever it is. You face it like a man. And you never, ever lie to any of us again. About anything. Do we have a deal?”
Ethan didn’t hesitate.
He held out his hand.
“Deal.”
I took it.
Danielle took it too.
Three hands in the center.
Bound by a common enemy.
Bound by two children.
Bound by the shared knowledge that tomorrow would change everything.
Forever.
Upstairs, the kids laughed.
Loud and happy.
Completely unaware that the world as they knew it was about to end.
And that out of the ashes, we were going to build something better.
Something honest.
May you like
Something real.
No matter what it cost.
