Chapter 9 - HER COUNTERATTACK
Vivi disappeared for thirteen hours.
That was enough time to remind me never to mistake silence for surrender.
At 4:20 that afternoon, while CPS interviewed Daniel and me separately at the hospital, she reappeared through an attorney named Gloria Peake and launched her counterattack.
First, she filed an emergency statement claiming I had coerced Noah into calling me Mommy during an unauthorized staff encounter.
Second, she alleged Daniel was suffering an emotional collapse that made him vulnerable to manipulation.
Third, she accused Lydia and Thomas of unlawfully accessing foundation systems for personal revenge.
It was almost impressive how quickly she turned defense into offense.
CPS worker Marissa Boone sat across from me with a legal pad and the weary expression of someone who had seen every rich family try to buy a cleaner version of truth.
“I need you to answer directly,” she said. “Did you instruct Noah to call you Mommy?”
“No.”
“Did you ever tell him Vivi was not his mother?”
“I told him I was his mother.”
“While a court order restricted how you could discuss family roles?”
There it was.
The knife hidden inside the question.
“Yes,” I said. “Because the order itself was being used to erase me.”
Marissa did not reward or punish the answer. She only wrote it down.
That irritated me enough to trust her a little.
“When did you first suspect wrongdoing beyond custody conflict?” she asked.
“When I found foundation discrepancies. Then when visitation records began using language I never heard spoken in the room. Then when Noah started flinching at the phrase Mommy Vivi.”
Marissa looked up at that.
“Did you report the flinching?”
“To staff, multiple times.”
“Names?”
I gave her every one I remembered.
Noah’s former nursery aide Rosa Delgado. Catering manager Helen. Security float Luis. Two court supervisors. One receptionist at Sloan & Mercer who once whispered, “I’m sorry,” when I arrived for a hearing notice that had already been canceled.
The interview went on for nearly an hour.
By the end, I was wrung out, furious, and no longer ashamed of sounding angry. Anger is not instability. Sometimes it is what reality feels like when someone keeps rewriting it around you.
Marissa ended with the question I feared most.
“Do you believe Daniel knowingly participated in separating Noah from you?”
I stared at my hands.
“No.”
It hurt to say because it also hurt to mean. He had failed me. He had failed Noah. He had trusted the wrong channels and left the truth to be handed to him in curated packets by the woman controlling both family and money.
But believing he knowingly did this would have been easier than sitting with what was actually true.
He did not know enough because he let himself not know enough.
That was different.
Not better. Different.
When Marissa left, Daniel came in from his own interview looking older than he had twenty-four hours earlier.
“She’s gone after everyone,” he said.
“That was always her style.”
He nodded once.
Then, after a silence: “CPS asked if I ever reviewed the raw foundation reimbursements myself.”
I knew from his face that the answer shamed him.
“Did you?”
“No.”
“What did you review?”
“Summary packets. Board digests. Quarterly audit briefs.”
Prepared by?
He answered before I asked.
“Vivi’s people.”
That mattered.
Because now his failure was becoming evidence too.
Then Lydia arrived with the notary report. The woman at Sloan & Mercer had admitted, through counsel, that she notarized my supposed hearing appearance without meeting me physically. She claimed Nathan Sloan told her it was permissible because “the client was emotionally fragile and had pre-cleared representation.”
Lydia dropped the printed declaration on the table.
Daniel read it once and went pale.
“So Sloan knew.”
“Yes,” Lydia said. “And if he knew, Mercer likely knew the conversion paperwork was false in structure even before we argue false in substance.”
That should have felt like a win.
Instead the cost arrived immediately.
Gloria Peake had also filed an emergency motion asking the court to place Noah in neutral foster-like medical shelter pending investigation of all parties.
I nearly stopped breathing.
“That can happen?”
“It can be requested,” Lydia said. “Not automatically granted.”
But once again, the reward came with consequence.
The more truth we pulled out, the more dangerous the space around Noah became.
Then Noah called from the bed.
“Mommy?”
I went to him at once.
He held up his stuffed bunny and said, “Vivi say no bunny if I tell Daddy.”
Daniel heard every word.
And for the first time since the gala, I saw not only guilt in his face.
May you like
I saw rage.
📖 Vivi’s counterattack nearly widened the danger around Noah, but the moment he admitted she threatened him with his bunny, Daniel finally stopped seeing this as a custody dispute and started seeing it as abuse. 👇
