Chapter 2 - THE TEXT MESSAGE
The screen of the woman’s phone glowed against the porch light, casting a harsh blue reflection across her face. My hands were freezing, yet a hot, prickling sweat broke out along the back of my neck.
“Please don’t tell my mom yet…”
I read the words three times, hoping the letters would rearrange themselves into something else. Something innocent. A school project. A surprise birthday party. But there was nothing innocent about a teenager helping her father’s mistress pick out a diamond ring.
“What is this?” I asked. My voice didn’t sound like my own; it sounded thin and brittle, like dry leaves crunching underfoot.
The woman pulled the phone slightly closer to her chest, her dark cat ears tilting as she looked at me with genuine distress. “I’m Jessica,” she said softly, her voice shaking. “Jessica Miller. I’m Ben’s legal assistant. And... and his girlfriend, or at least that’s what he promised me we were becoming.”
“Don’t call yourself his girlfriend while you’re standing outside holding a picture of my seventeen-year-old daughter shopping for your engagement ring,” I snapped, the shock instantly hardening into a dangerous, cold clarity.
Jessica flinched. She tapped the screen, scrolling down to show me more messages.
“Look, Mrs. Whitmore—Claire. I didn't know about Lily until three weeks ago. Ben told me he was going through a messy divorce, that you two hadn’t shared a room in years, and that Lily was old enough to understand. But then Lily reached out to me directly.”
I stared at her, horrified. “Lily reached out to you?”
“She found my personal number on Ben’s work calendar,” Jessica said, turning the phone so I could read the thread. “She told me she wanted to meet me. I thought she was going to yell at me. I thought she was going to tell me to stay away from her father.”
“And instead?”
“Instead, she handed me that blue box at the jewelry store,” Jessica whispered. “She said, ‘If you’re going to make my dad happy, wear it right. My mom spent twenty years letting him take her for granted.’”
The words hit me harder than the kiss I had witnessed through the eyeholes of a bedsheet. My seventeen-year-old daughter, who I had raised, cooked for, and comforted through every teenage heartbreak, had not only known about the affair—she had endorsed it. She had actively helped another woman replace me.
Before I could process the suffocating weight of that betrayal, the front door of the townhouse swung open.
Music and laughter spilled out into the night air. And there stood Ben, without his vampire cape, his face white as paper. Behind him, framed in the doorway, was someone I never expected to see.
Lily stood in the hallway, holding a plastic cup of punch, wearing her favorite oversized sweater.
May you like
Her eyes widened when she saw me standing on the pavement with Jessica, my wedding ring sitting inside a candy bowl that I was still clutching like a lifeline.
“Mom?” Lily breathed, the cup slipping from her fingers and shattering on the porch tiles.
