There was only the clean, cold work of getting my girls out.

“You’re not keeping her here to keep me here,” I said.

“It won’t work, Vaughn.

And if you try to make it a fight, it becomes a public one.”

That last word did the work. Public. Because Vaughn had a secret that only stayed survivable in private — the money.

For the better part of two years he’d been quietly moving money to Odette, the woman he’d been seeing, the woman who had, by then, remade herself into a fixture of his mother’s household.

Transfers.