Eudora had to have mentioned something.
“I wanted to let you know.” She steps over her words carefully, her tight eyes jutting all over the room. “Your father gave me sole medical power of attorney. Our dual power of attorney is temporarily suspended, given your current state.”
“What? No. You can’t do that.”
“No, no, dear. Your father decided.” Her legs cross, and her expression is emotionless. Then again, it usually is. The woman’s face is so filled, she can hardly smile anymore.
“My father? The man who doesn’t even know who you are half the time?” My voice is raised. “He’s not in any condition to make changes like that, and you know it.”
“And you’re not in any condition to make decisions about anyone’s care, including yourself. I had to do what’s best for the family.”
I could slap her, and I’m not a violent person. A million words fly through my mind, threatening to take a detour to my lips.
But I remember Derek’s advice. We can’t let her know we’re onto her. It’ll only make things harder.
“The family?” I scoff. “You’re not a part of this family, Veronica.”
“I care about you, sweetheart.” She leans across the table, placing her hand over mine, but I yank it away. Her expression is a phony kind of warm, but her touch is cold as ice. “I know you don’t believe it, but I do. I love my Harold, and part of loving Harold is loving his daughter.”
“Don’t sit here at my table and feed me lies in front of my ailing father. Have a little more respect.” I rise, staring down at my father in his catatonic state. His face twitches, and his eyes almost sputter to life. He looks up at me, then to Veronica.
“Ladies, what is going on?” he asks, appearing for a moment to be somewhat lucid.
Veronica’s lips waver and dance as she looks at me.
“Daddy, did you know Veronica made herself your sole medical power of attorney?” I ask.
He folds his meaty knuckled hands across his bulbous belly, his bushy white brows meeting in the middle.
“Yes, Serena. We made that decision together.” His words break my heart. He only thinks they made the decision together. I know manipulation when I see it. “You’re not well, princess. As soon as you’re back to yourself again, everything will go back to the way it was.”
“So if something happens to you—God forbid—you’re okay with Veronica making all your medical decisions?” I fold my arms, glaring at my evil-incarnate stepmother.
His face relaxes, and he stares ahead, groaning and grumbling under his breath. He shifts, uncomfortable in his wheelchair. And then he looks at me, his face twisted as a question mark.
“Who’s Veronica?” he asks.
I throw my hands in the air. Just like that, he’s gone. And it’s too late, because Veronica’s already weaseling her way into the family fortune. The day my father’s connected to a machine, she’ll be the first one telling the doctors to pull the plug—assuming she gets her way with the inheritance first.
At least when she shared medical power of attorney, there were safeguards in place.
“He has his moments, Serena. Please don’t be frustrated,” Veronica says. “Believe me when I say these decisions were discussed during his coherent stretches.”
“Right.” My lips form a hard line. “Is this all you came here for? Will you be on your way now?”
Bettina bursts through double doors with a tray full of food.
“Well, I thought we could all enjoy a lovely breakfast together,” Veronica says. “It’s been weeks since we shared a meal, and it’s such a beautiful morning. I thought maybe we could take it outside? The fresh air might help. Do you go outside much, sweetheart?”
Her question is a test. Of that I’m sure.
“I get plenty of fresh air,” I say. “Would be nice to have a car though. You know, so I can actually leave the grounds once in a while.”
“Oh, my love, that’s not a good idea. Dr. Rothbart doesn’t want you driving until your medications are balanced. That’s why you have a driver on call. If you want to leave, just ring Jameson, and he’ll pick you up.”
“He’s two hours away, and he’s your driver, and you use him everyday.”
“Then we’ll hire a new driver for you.” Veronica lifts a brow at the chef and points to the patio. “You’ve lived in the city for a long time. Driving’s not really your forte. Leave that to the professionals, shall we? That’s what Randalls do best.”
She chuckles.
“I’ll take my breakfast in my room,” I say to Bettina. Turning on my heel, I waste no time moving toward the stairs.
“Serena, do not walk away from me,” Veronica calls from behind. I don’t hear her footsteps. And she won’t chase me. It’s not her style. “Dr. Rothbart will be stopping by later this week for another evaluation. It doesn’t appear that you’re getting much better.”
I hear her shout out words like, “overly emotional” and “an embarrassment to the family” and “unacceptable, irrational behavior.” And I let her say what she needs to say. Soon enough, I’ll be gone. I’ll prove her wrong. I’ll prove her to be a criminal. And this will all be a distant memory.
I fly up the stairs and head to my prison suite, slamming the door behind me like a spoiled princess, and damn, does it feel good for all of two seconds.
A shock stops my heart cold when I see Veronica’s personal assistant, Julia, rifling through my drawers.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I fly to her side, gripping her wrist and yanking it from my things.
She’s frozen. A deer in headlights. “I’m so sorry, Serena.”
“I’m going to ask you one more time.” I release her, folding my arms. “What are you doing?”
Sputtering sounds leave her mouth and she eyes the door.
“You’re not leaving my room until you tell me, Julia.” I block her view of the exit. “This is completely inappropriate. Does Veronica know you’re up here?”
Her look tells me everything I need to know—everything I suspected.
“She put you up to this,” I say.
“Please,” she says. “Let me go. I don’t want to be a part of this.”
“What were you looking for?” I ask.
Julia hangs her head. “Please don’t do this to me, Serena. I was only doing as I was told. I can’t lose my job.”
“You won’t,” I say. “Just tell me.”
“Pills,” she blurts out, red-faced. “I was supposed to see if you were hoarding pills. Veronica was worried you were hoarding them so you could hurt yourself.”
My fists clench. Enough with the lies and illusions.
It has to end.
It’s gone on long enough, and it’s going way too far.
I have to get out of here, even if it’s Rixton wherever, like Derek suggested.
“Leave,” I say through a tightened jaw. “And I’d better not ever catch you in here again.”
Chapter 7
Derek
Leaning over Gladys’s desk on Wednesday, I slip her a circular from last night’s paper.
“What’s this?” she asks.
“Horton Satellite Internet,” I say. “I need you to call and request an emergency installation at Belcourt Manor.”
“Can I do that?” She pushes her glasses up the bridge of her bumpy nose and reads the fine print.
“As conservator of Serena Randall’s estate, I’m authorizing you to do it it.”
She picks up her phone, cradling the receiver on her shoulder, and punches in the eight hundred number on the paper.
Hoisting up my briefcase, I slip past my dad’s office, ducking in and saying hello. He’s mixing his coffee, as he usually does at this hour. I wait until he’s finished. He has to get a precise ratio of sugar to cream to coffee, and I’ve watched him dump out far too many perfectly good cups because something was a little off.
“Son. Morning,” he says, taking a sip from his mug
and nodding when the taste is to his liking. “Have a good weekend?”
“I did,” I say. “I met with Serena Randall on Saturday.”
He scrunches his face. “On a Saturday? Why would you do that?”
“She wasn’t able to meet for long on Friday,” I say. “And I did a little research on the case Friday night. I had some more questions. Wanted to get to know her a little better.”
Dad sighs, smoothing his palm down his plaid tie as he bends to sit. The lines framing the sides of his mouth flex deep as he stares ahead. I’ve seen this look before. He’s thinking too hard about something.
“This is the financial conservator assignment, correct?” he asks.
“Right.”
“You don’t need to research anything, Derek. You simply establish a budget and report the incoming and outgoing funds to the courts as scheduled. You’re making more work out of this than necessary.”
I shut his door and take the seat across from him. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
His head tilts to one side, and he skims his thumb along his thick, dark mustache. I used to think it made him look intimidating. Now it just reminds me of Tom Selleck in his prime.
“At the surface, this is a simple conservator case,” I say. “Scratch that surface and look again? It’s an estate case. The stepmother is trying to prove the daughter is mentally unsound so she can get the father to change the will. She’s paying people to make false statements. Even the car accident was a hoax.”
Dad leans forward, his finger in the air. “Wait a minute. You have proof of this?”
“Working on it.”
He massages his middle finger against his temple, exhaling with a groan. “The Randalls are a very prominent, powerful family. They have a lot of money and a lot of resources. You can’t go muddying up their names because you think you caught a whiff of fraud. You need to have solid evidence before you so much as make a single pointed accusation, or your name will be mud. Our name.”
“One of the psychiatric reports reference Serena attempting to end her life by driving her car off a bridge in Walworth Township,” I say. “The bridge was six feet off the ground, and the creek below it was only two feet deep. If someone were to try and end their life, why would they do it there?”
“Because they weren’t of sound mind at the time.” His arms fold across his chest, and his head tilts in the opposite direction.
I ignore him. He hasn’t met her yet. He can see for himself the kind of mental state she’s in, and that will answer his question.
“The doctor’s report stated she stayed in a private psychiatric care center in upstate New York after the accident,” I say. “Serena claims she’s never left Belcourt. She claimed she was evaluated by a doctor, treated for a mild concussion, and monitored at home by a nurse during the week that followed.”
“Find me that nurse. Find someone to corroborate her story.”
“Easy enough, right?” I ask. “Wrong. We suspect these people may be on her stepmother’s payroll. She’s buying their false statements. Coming clean would have major consequences for everyone involved. It won’t be easy.”
Dad leans forward, resting his elbows against the polished glass top of his walnut desk. “You’re going to be eyeballs deep in your own shit if you keep this up.”
I snivel. “You have no faith.”
“I think you’re a smart man doing a foolish thing.”
“What happened to doing the right thing?” I stare at the old man before me, his shoulders weighted down from years of bearing everyone else’s burdens. “What happened to justice?”
He leans back, his chair creaking and popping as he spins to face the picture window to his side.
“I ask myself that every day.” He shakes his head, and for the second time in my life, I find the magic around my father’s façade to be more illusion than anything else. “Sometimes, you do what’s best for your career, and sometimes, that isn’t always what’s best for your clients.”
His words are a punch to my gut, and I find myself speechless for a moment.
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying.” His eyes snap in mine. “You’re young. You have a lot to learn. You have a long career ahead of you. Stick to the safe cases for now. Stick to what you know. Don’t get involved in the Randalls’ family drama unless you’re explicitly hired to do so, and even then, I’d refer them to some shark in Manhattan who thinks these cases are a dime a dozen.”
“You don’t think I’m good enough to take on this case.” God, I feel like I’m fucking thirteen years old. “So spending the majority of my twenties studying law was for nothing.”
“You’re a damn fine lawyer, Derek.” Dad slams his clenched fist on his desk, and his pens jump in unison. “Damn fine.”
“But what?”
“Do you realize how bad this is going to look?” His dark brows meet. “You’re hired to look after her money, and now you’re sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, convincing her there’s a case that needs to be billed, extra work to be done. You’re not doing this for free, Derek.”
“Of course not.” God forbid the practice misses a single billed hour. “And I’m a professional. This won’t look bad. Serena’s a good person. She deserves her name back. Her reputation. Her inheritance.”
“What’s this Serena like?” His tone changes. He’s baiting me.
“Why does that matter?”
“How would you describe her?”
I laugh to myself, keeping a straight face. I’m onto him. “You want me to tell you she’s beautiful. You want me to say she’s lovely and intelligent and the epitome of grace and class, and then you’re going to accuse me of having a thing for her, and then you’ll claim my judgment is clouded, and I should be removed from my role as conservator.”
His jaw juts out, his arms folding. “You think like your old man. One step ahead.”
“She’s my client. That’s all she’ll ever be. No boundaries will be crossed. No good names will be tarnished. I’m a professional.”
He studies me, one eye pinched.
“You have my word,” I say.
My father’s phone rings—a timely interruption—and he presses the speaker button with a meaty knuckle.
“Is Derek in there with you?” Gladys’s voice pierces my eardrums.
“Yes, Gladys. I’m in here.”
“Kyla’s on line two.” She hangs up.
“What the hell does Kyla want on a Wednesday?” Dad gives me a questioning stare, and I roll my eyes before heading back to my office because I have no fucking clue.
I groan into my receiver when I’m at my desk a moment later. “What do you need?”
My ex-wife harrumphs. “Always so excited to talk to me.”
“Is Haven okay?”
Her pause sends an electrical current down my chest.
“Of course she’s okay, Derek.” She spits her words through the phone. “To imply otherwise is just . . . not cool.”
“Then why are you bothering me at the office in the middle of the week? Shouldn’t you be in Pilates class? Or are Wednesdays for barre? No, wait. Hot yoga. My mistake.”
Kyla sighs. “You’re just mad that my body looks better now than it ever has, and for the first time, you don’t get to enjoy it.”
“Yes, yes,” I say. “I’m well aware that your sculpted ass is for the new man in your life. Or should I say old man? Isn’t he twice your age?”
She doesn’t respond, and I grin ear-to-ear at the image of her fuming silently from her sun-filled, white-washed kitchen in some boring little suburban neighborhood two hours away. I bet she has the grandest kitchen on her block, and the ironic thing is, Kyla doesn’t cook. Can’t even boil water.
“And your point?” She fires back with a jagged tone that cuts worse than a dull butter knife.
“I guess . . . I guess I don’t have one?” I stifle a laugh in my tone. God, how I love fucking with Kyla. Some days, it�
�s the best thing about having her as an ex-wife. “I guess . . . I guess I just wanted to remind you that you’re married to a guy with wrinkly, old man balls.”
I hear her slam the phone down on the counter from her end. And then it’s silent. But she’s still there. I can hear her rustling around in the background.
“Are we done?” she scolds a moment later. “Please have a little more respect for your daughter’s stepfather.”
“You mean Grandpa Stepdad?” I yank the phone away so she doesn’t hear me laugh. When I come back, she’s chewing me out. “In my defense, Haven came up with that one.”
“Right. I highly doubt Haven came up with that all on her own.”
“Okay, it may have been a joint effort.”
“Grow the fuck up, Derek. Seriously. Grow. Up.”
Most of the time, I’m the epitome of grown up. But sometimes, life can be so fucking brutal that the only way I can cope with it is by having a sense of humor. Who marries the love of their life, has a gorgeous baby girl with them, creates this beautiful fucking life together, and then comes home early the Friday before Valentine’s day to find the sixty-year-old plastic surgeon who did her breast implants nailing her from behind as she’s bent over the back of the sofa?
Fucking hilarious. I can’t make this shit up.
At that point, she’d had her tits done for a year. I remembered because the day she stopped breastfeeding Haven, she’d claimed they were ruined and demanded I pay to get them fixed. For all I knew, their budding attraction started the day he felt up her pancake tits in exam room number four.
Five grand for new DDs. Tens of thousands lost in the divorce settlement. And a third of my monthly income going straight to her pocketbook in the form of child support while she plays hot housewife for Dr. Herbert Hodge IV.
And thanks to the wonderful family court judge we had the pleasure of dealing with—who’s apparently stuck in 1992—Haven gets to see me every other weekend, alternate holidays, and two weeks every summer. No amount of lawyering or dragging out the case would get that old broad to budge.
By the end of the trial, we were all exhausted, and in the end, it was Haven who suffered. My sweet, innocent daughter caught in a tug-of-war between two people who never should’ve been together in the first place.
The Complete Rixton Falls Series Page 30