PART ONE – THE AMBUSH
I got home and walked into the library to find my whole family staring at my husband and my sister in a thick, suffocating silence. My father, George Henderson, stood up at the head of the long, heavy mahogany table like he was presiding over a board meeting in some old-money mansion outside of Boston instead of sitting in his own home. The late afternoon light from the tall windows fell across the leather chairs, the shelves of law books, the framed certificates and plaques that screamed old American money and respectability.
He didn’t offer me a seat. He pointed to the empty chair opposite him at the head of the table, the way a senior partner might gesture to a junior associate being called in for a performance review. “Daughter, sit down,” he said, his jaw tight.
“We need to talk.”
I smiled and walked toward the chair, my heels clicking on the polished hardwood. “Sure,” I replied, my tone light and deceptively calm. The reaction was immediate.
The way they all looked at me, you would have thought I’d pulled a gun out of my purse. My answer left them in a stunned, brittle silence. My husband, Jared, wouldn’t even look at me.
He sat halfway down the table, staring at his shoes, his hands shaking slightly in his lap. Next to him sat my younger sister, Caitlyn, seven months pregnant and smirking. One manicured hand rested protectively on her swollen belly.
She looked like every glossy American lifestyle ad I’d ever seen—perfect blowout, designer maternity dress, diamond earrings catching the light. My mother, Leslie, sat by the window, weeping silently into a lace handkerchief. She was playing the role of the heartbroken matriarch to perfection, the fragile Southern belle transplanted into a wealthy suburban estate somewhere in the United States.
The air in the room was thick enough to choke on. This wasn’t a family gathering. This was an ambush.
George didn’t waste time on pleasantries. He reached for a thick stack of legal documents and slid them across the table toward me. The papers landed with a heavy thud that echoed in the silence.
“We aren’t asking for a divorce, Alice,” he said, his voice cold and stripped of any fatherly warmth. “We are demanding you sign over your fifty-one percent stake in the company to protect the family assets.”
He paused, letting the weight of those words settle. “Because Caitlyn is carrying the heir,” he added, almost casually.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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