Chapter 2 - The Blueprints in the Credenza
For five seconds, the rushing water from the brass tap was the only sound in the narrow pantry while my mind processed the monstrous story my husband had constructed behind my back.
A lesser survival instinct might have made me scream in Jade’s face that this baby had been conceived in my own bed on my birthday and that Daniel and I had never been separated for a single day.
Instead, eleven years of working high-risk trauma shifts at the hospital taught me to keep my face completely still when a patient—or a witness—was bleeding out the truth right in front of me.
"Daniel told you about the contract?" I asked quietly, shutting off the faucet and drying my hands on a linen towel so she wouldn't see my fingers trembling.
"He had to show my father and me the legal releases last month before my firm wired the two-million-dollar escrow deposit for the Hollis Manor boutique hotel conversion," Jade confided eagerly, lowering her voice even further as if we were co-conspirators.
"My father refused to invest in a property tied up in a messy divorce or an unplanned pregnancy, so once Daniel showed us Rosemary's early-onset dementia diagnosis and your surrogacy waiver, we cleared the wire transfer on Tuesday."
Rosemary's early-onset dementia diagnosis.
My sixty-eight-year-old mother-in-law could complete the Sunday crossword in ink in twelve minutes flat and still balanced the county historical society’s books to the penny without a calculator.
"You should head back in before Daniel wonders where we went, Jade, I will bring the pumpkin pie out in a minute," I said smoothly, offering her a calm nod that sent her gliding back into the dining room completely unsuspecting.
The instant the swinging door clicked shut behind her, I did not touch the pumpkin pie sitting on the counter.
I slipped through the rear laundry passage, climbed the carpeted back servants' staircase to the second floor despite the dull ache low in my pelvis, and walked straight down the dark hallway to Daniel’s home office.
The brass keyhole on his mahogany credenza was locked, just as it had been three weeks ago when he snapped his monitor shut in my face, only Daniel had forgotten that I was the one who had organized his keyring after his appendix surgery two years ago.
I reached behind the framed engineering degree hanging on the wall, peeled the spare brass key from the masking tape stuck to the backing board, and turned the lock on the bottom drawer.
Inside sat a thick leather binder stamped with the gold logo of Prescott Development Group alongside a sealed yellow legal folder marked for emergency filing at the county courthouse tomorrow morning at nine o'clock.
With my cell phone camera set to silent, I photographed the two-million-dollar wire receipt showing Daniel had diverted half of Jade’s investment straight into an offshore Cayman account under his sole name.
Then I opened the yellow courthouse folder, and the breath vanished from my lungs as I read the notarized affidavits stapled inside.
Daniel hadn't just forged my signature on a fake gestational surrogacy agreement to trick Jade’s father out of two million dollars—he had paid off a disgraced psychiatric resident at a private clinic to sign an emergency involuntary commitment order declaring that I was suffering from severe perinatal psychosis and was a danger to my unborn child!
According to the court petition scheduled to be signed by a family judge tomorrow morning, county deputies were going to pick up Rosemary at ten o'clock to lock her inside a closed memory-care ward, while I would be held under psychiatric restraint until my daughter was delivered by scheduled cesarean and handed straight to Daniel and Jade!
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Before I could slide the yellow folder back into the drawer, the heavy oak door of the study swung open behind me without a sound.
I spun around with the papers still in my hands and found Daniel standing in the doorway, the charming Thanksgiving host completely gone as his cold blue eyes locked onto the open credenza drawer and he clicked the brass deadbolt shut behind his back.
