I have lived through miscarriages, bankruptcy scares, labor pains that made me black out between contractions, my husband’s heart attack, the funeral that followed, the first night sleeping alone in the house we built together, and the sound of my grandson asking after Warren in the present tense six months after we buried him. Few things in life can still truly astonish me. But watching my son offer me forty dollars as if I were some little old woman who needed an allowance from the people using her money to subsidize their lives—that astonished me.
Karen smiled. “You’ll thank us later. Once the dust settles and you stop making this emotional.”
There it was again. Women are always emotional when they object to being erased.
“I would rather starve,” I said quietly, “than take scraps from my own son after he steals what his father and I built.”
Karen’s face hardened. The polish slipped for half a second and something rawer showed through. “Don’t be melodramatic.”
Desmond looked at me then with a level gaze and delivered the most deliberate cruelty of the entire morning.
“If you fight us on this,” he said, “you won’t see Emma and Tyler again.”
I did not move.