Chapter 10 - The Staircase Wasn't About the Folder
The major twist came from an ordinary email.
Margaret had written it to Ethan four months earlier.
You need to start taking full control before the baby arrives. Claire won't want the stress once she's a mother.
Ethan replied:
She owns half, Mom. Stop.
That response mattered.
It proved something I hadn't expected.
Ethan had been lying about money.
He had enabled Margaret.
But he had resisted her attempts to remove me from the company.
The doorbell conversation now made more sense too.
When Margaret asked whether I'd found “the papers,” Ethan believed she meant documents supposedly showing I was secretly moving money.
He hadn't arrived with her to confront me.
He'd gone home because Margaret told him our marriage was in immediate danger.
Then she went upstairs alone.
And attacked me.
Three earlier clues changed meaning.
Her obsession with my return to work.
The partial repayment when I announced it.
Her lie to Ethan that I was preparing to leave.
Margaret wasn't simply trying to recover a blue folder.
She was trying to create a crisis large enough to separate Ethan and me before we compared what she'd told each of us.
My pregnancy wasn't incidental.
It created the deadline.
Once I returned to the company, the financial structure she'd built would become much harder to hide.
Ethan looked sick when he understood.
“She was turning us against each other.”
“Yes.”
“And I let her.”
“Yes.”
He looked at me.
“Can we fix this?”
I put a hand over my stomach.
“The finances?”
I paused.
“Probably.”
“Our marriage?”
That answer was harder.
May you like
“I don't know.”
And for the first time, Ethan had to face consequences his mother couldn't negotiate away for him.
