Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 69170 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 346(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69170 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 346(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
My mama came from boatloads of money, and she gave it all up to marry my Daddy but still taught me that life was about more than money while raising me to live as if I had the best of everything. That used to drive Marie crazy because her family couldn’t even walk in my Mama’s family’s shadow, but yeah.
I always knew that was part of her problem with me. The fact that she and her ilk looked down on my mother for giving up a life of ease to marry my dad and still carried herself like the daughter of privilege that she was. My mama wouldn’t think twice about putting one of them in their place and have done so with Marie a time or two over the years.
Especially in the beginning, when Marie tried to come between me and her son, mama was always the one to put her in her place with a few choice words that always left the other woman flustered and silently fuming. Since most of what was said were usually whispered in my mother-in-law’s ear, I was never privy to what it was that could shut the other woman up for the rest of the day.
She’d mellowed out some once the kids were born, but there was no secret that she didn’t like or approve of me for her family. Dalton had never said much of anything, though he’d silence her with a look once in a while, so though I knew he liked me, I never would’ve expected him to go against his wife to defend me.
“Those things he said about me, I never knew he saw me in that light.” I was still a bit shaken by the revelations from my father-in-law. You know that feeling like you’d been watched from afar without you knowing it? And the person can recite things about you that you thought had gone unnoticed? It was like that, but in a good way, of course.
He'd recalled things that I myself had long forgotten or brushed off as just par for the course in everyday life. Like the time, he was really sick in the hospital, and I visited him every day while juggling very young kids. How I’d sit and read to him without rushing, taking my time to make sure he was as comfortable as he could be in that situation while his wife could barely spare him half an hour before having to rush off to her next hair appointment or whatever else she had going on at the time.
He talked about me taking care of the kids and how patient and loving I had always been. How I’d drop everything to see to one of my kids, no matter how big or small the issue was. I just thought those things were normal, that any mother anywhere would do them. I didn’t do them for praise.
But it seemed he had been watching and taking notes. He’d called out his wife for not being half the wife or mother that I was, which had set her off to the point she asked to leave. No ordered him to leave with her, which he shut down with a succinct no and told her to sit down. I thought she would expire right there at the table.
I wanted to excuse the kids, at least, but he’d vetoed that idea as well. “They’re old enough to hear what I have to say, seeing as it involves them as well.” Was his response to that. That’s when he’d gone on to talk about his will. Apparently, he’d changed it in the last week after learning about the divorce, and what he’d done had set both my asshole ex and his mother off again.
I was still trying to come to terms with it, and if I wasn’t the one in the middle of this mess, I’d swear it was fiction. Dalton had added me to his will; not only that, but I would own a percentage of his company along with my ex and the kids, which meant that we owned more of the company combined than Kevin did, and Marie wasn’t even mentioned, which did not go over well.
When she argued and was told she never had any interest in the business beyond how much money she had to spend and knew nothing about the workings of it, so she didn’t need to have any say once he was gone, she almost bore holes in me with her eyes.
I was too caught off guard to say or do anything, and when she said I didn’t deserve twenty percent of the company that had been in his family for four generations because I wasn’t family, his answer had been that neither was she by the same token. I almost fell out of my chair.