Chapter 7 - The Version She Sold
The email came from Victoria’s attorney.
Hannah told me not to answer it.
I read it anyway.
According to Victoria, I was an absent husband with an inappropriate attachment to our nanny.
Emily was unstable.
The nursery incident had been a desperate attempt to protect the babies during a childcare emergency.
And I had seized on it to remove Victoria from the home.
I read that paragraph until the words lost meaning.
Then I scrolled down.
There were photographs.
Me carrying Noah’s birthday cake into Emily’s apartment three months earlier.
Me standing beside Emily at a hospital fundraiser.
Me asleep in an armchair with Owen on my chest while Emily folded blankets nearby.
All ordinary.
All cropped to tell a different story.
The cake had been Victoria’s idea.
She had taken the picture.
I called Hannah.
“She planned this.”
“Possibly,” she said. “We prove what we can prove.”
“She’s trying to make Emily look like—”
“I know. Don’t help her by sending an angry reply.”
Later that night, Grace showed me a post from one of Victoria’s friends.
No names.
No direct accusation.
Just a tearful paragraph about a new mother betrayed by the people inside her own home.
The comments filled with sympathy.
I wanted to throw my phone through a window.
Instead, I turned it off and changed Sophie’s diaper.
She screamed through the entire operation.
“I know,” I told her. “I’m not enjoying my day either.”
Grace laughed once from the doorway.
It was the first laugh in the house since I had come home.
At the hospital, Emily saw the post before I could warn her.
“I should leave,” she said.
“Leave where?”
“The job. Your family. All of it.”
“You don’t have to protect me from what she did.”
“I’m trying to protect Noah.”
That silenced me.
She looked through the doorway at her sleeping son.
“I can survive people calling me names. He shouldn’t have to.”
“You’re right.”
She seemed surprised.
I pulled up a chair.
“Tell me what would help. Not what you think I want to hear.”
She considered that for a long time.
“An attorney who works for me.”
“Okay.”
“And no more promises made through somebody else.”
“Okay.”
She nodded.
Then her phone rang.
A woman from the hospital billing office introduced herself.
May you like
There had been another call about Noah’s account.
Someone claiming to be Emily had asked for the remaining assistance application to be withdrawn.
