The day we put my wife in the ground, my daughter‑in‑law started circling my life like a vulture. One week after we lowered Carol into the cold November dirt outside Chicago, I sat at the head of the Peterson Freight boardroom table in the suit that still smelled faintly of funeral lilies. Across from me, my son and his wife sat like they were interviewing me for my own job.
Brenda crossed one perfect leg over the other, the red sole of her stiletto flashing against the mahogany.
She rested her manicured hands on a leather portfolio that cost more than the first truck Carol and I ever bought and gave me a smile that could have frozen Lake Michigan. “Now that the old woman is gone,” she said, light and casual, as if we were picking a brunch spot and not talking about my life’s work, “it’s time to be practical.
You’ll transfer the company into my husband’s name and focus on taking care of yourself. That’s the smart move, right, Jake?”
My son Ryan shifted beside her, shoulders tightening under his custom suit.
He stared at the glass of water in front of him like there might be answers at the bottom.
He didn’t look at me. He rarely looked directly at me when she was in the room. I just smiled back.
Because Brenda thought she’d walked me into an ambush.
She didn’t know I had already called in artillery. My lawyer wasn’t on his way with a will.
He was on his way with a single sealed envelope that would rip the floor out from under her high heels and light her carefully plotted future on fire. My name is Jacob Peterson.
I’m sixty-five years old.
And this isn’t a story about grief. This is a story about war. It really started that day in the boardroom.
Carol had been gone seven days.
I was still waking up reaching for a woman who wasn’t there, still hearing her humming Sinatra off-key in the kitchen every time the pipes rattled. I wasn’t ready to talk about succession or estate planning.
I was barely ready to pick a tie. But Brenda was more than ready.
The Peterson Freight boardroom looked out over the Chicago skyline, all glass and steel and ambition.
Our logo glowed on the far wall in brushed metal. Forty years earlier, Carol and I had signed loan papers for one battered used rig at a kitchen table sticky with toddler juice. Now there were a hundred trucks moving freight across half the country.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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