Chapter 6 - The Invitation List
Mrs. Higgins choked slightly on her tea, setting her porcelain cup down with a sharp clink against the saucer. “My word, Daniel! Is something the matter? Vivian has been telling me all morning about how hard she’s working to keep this household together while your poor wife struggles with postpartum blues—”
“Postpartum blues is an interesting phrase, Mrs. Higgins,” I said, walking over to the large smart television mounted above the stone fireplace. I pulled a sleek silver flash drive from my pocket. “Especially when the person diagnosing it has a history of medical manipulation spanning thirty years.”
Vivian’s face drained of color. The beatific mask cracked, revealing the cold, calculating stranger underneath. “Daniel. Have you lost your mind? What kind of sick joke is this in front of a guest?”
“It’s not a joke, Mother,” I said, plugging the flash drive into the USB port beneath the television. “In fact, it’s the most honest conversation we’ve ever had in this house.”
Before Vivian could lunge forward to yank the cord from the wall, I pressed a button on my smartphone remote.
The television screen flickered to life.
Instead of cable news or a family slideshow, the high-definition display illuminated the living room with live-streamed and recorded video footage from the nursery. The room was cast in the crisp, merciless light of noon.
On screen, crystal clear and amplified through the surround-sound speakers, was the exact footage from earlier that morning: shattered glass sparkling on the nursery floor; Emma trembling so hard she could barely stand; Oliver screaming in Vivian’s arms; and my mother’s cold, venomous whisper echoing off the walls: “Your baby is crying because his mother is weak… Clean it up. Every piece. Then you can hold him.”
Mrs. Higgins gasped aloud, her hand flying to her mouth, her eyes darting between the screen and my mother in absolute horror.
Vivian froze, her breath catching in her throat. For the first time in her life, the invulnerable queen of manipulation looked cornered.
“Wh-where did you get that?” Vivian hissed, her voice dropping its sweet facade, revealing the sharp, gravelly edge of pure malice. “You installed cameras in my house? In my grandson’s nursery? You paranoid, ungrateful little—!”
“Not your house, Mother,” I corrected her quietly, stepping between her and the television screen. “My house. Bought with my salary, registered in my name. And those cameras weren't installed out of paranoia. They were installed because for weeks, my wife has been crying herself to sleep, my son has been unnaturally distressed, and every time I left, the monitors mysteriously failed.”
“Vivian…” Mrs. Higgins stammered, stumbling backward toward the foyer, clutching her handbag like a shield. “Is… is this true? You made a recovering mother crawl across broken glass?”
“She’s exaggerating!” Vivian shrieked, her voice cracking as panic finally took hold of her composure. She pointed a trembling finger at me. “He’s turning his own mother in! He’s listening to that hysterical, lazy wife of his! She’s mentally unstable, I tell you! She staged all of it!”
“Staged glass shattering across the carpet? Staged her own medical trauma?” I asked coldly, pulling out the second folder Marcus had delivered. I tossed it onto the coffee table right in front of Mrs. Higgins. “And did she stage the death of Arthur Pendelton twenty-eight years ago? Did she stage the social services investigation into how she locked my sister Natalie in a basement for two days?”
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Mrs. Higgins looked down at the court-sealed documents, her eyes wide as she read the bold headings of probate fraud and child endangerment.
Vivian stared at the folder on the table as if it were a venomous snake about to strike.
