Chapter 1 - The Woman in My Living Room
"Leave now, or I'm calling the police! My son bought this apartment for me!"
My mother-in-law screamed those words before I'd even managed to drag my second suitcase across the threshold.
For one strange second, I thought exhaustion had scrambled reality on me. My flight out of Denver had been delayed twice. My shoulder ached from sleeping upright against a window in seat 22C. The zipper on my garment bag had blown out somewhere between baggage claim and the parking garage. It was almost eight o'clock on a gray Thursday night in Nashville, and all I wanted in the entire world was to walk into my own apartment, kick off my shoes, drink water out of an actual glass, and sleep for twelve straight hours.
Instead, Deborah Kessler was standing in my living room in a satin robe the color of spoiled champagne, hair rolled up in curlers, holding a mug that had belonged to my grandmother.
My grandmother's mug.
White ceramic. Blue violets. A tiny chip on the handle from the time I dropped it at twelve years old and cried like I'd ruined something sacred. Grandma Marion had just laughed, dabbed a bit of glue on the crack, and told me, "Pretty things with chips still hold coffee just fine, Viv. Don't let anybody tell you different."
Now Deborah had her lipstick smeared across the rim.
She stood there like she'd always owned the place.
Behind her, my whole home had been rearranged into somebody else's idea of superiority. The framed photos on my console table were gone — my parents at the lake, my sister Nicole laughing with powdered sugar on her nose, me standing outside this building the day I closed on it, keys in one hand and a cheap grocery-store bouquet in the other. My cream throw pillows had been swapped out for stiff embroidered things that read Bless This Home and Family Is Everything. A lace dust cover hung off my dining room chandelier, like she'd looked up one day and decided even the light fixtures needed to cover themselves.
The whole apartment smelled like her perfume — old roses and entitlement.
I set down my suitcase handle.
"Deborah," I said.
"Don't you Deborah me," she snapped, gripping the mug tighter. "You heard me. Get out. This is my home now."
My name is Vivian Hale. I was thirty-one, recently separated from Deborah's son, standing in the foyer of the Nashville apartment I'd bought three full years before I ever met Marcus Kessler. Bought with my own money. Titled in my own name. Renovated with bonuses from the consulting job Marcus liked to sneer at — right up until those same bonuses paid for the hardwood floors, the kitchen appliances, the built-in bookshelves, and the down payment he never contributed one dollar toward.
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I'd just spent six weeks in Denver helping my younger sister recover from emergency surgery.
Apparently six weeks was all the time Marcus and his mother needed to turn my absence into an invasion.
