He’d carried his son out a side door and away from all of it, quietly, the way you carry a sleeping child, which is the only dignified way anyone left that house all night.

And Vaughn was left standing alone in the middle of a ruined dinner.

His money gone into a woman who’d never been his.

His new family gone out the door in another man’s arms.

His mother collapsed in her chair refusing to look at him.

Sixteen years and three daughters traded, it turned out, for nothing at all — and all of it undone in the time it takes to serve dessert.

Chapter 14 — The Call