Chapter 2 - THE FARMHOUSE HE NEEDED ME TO SIGN AWAY
I didn’t sleep that night.
I sat in a hotel room twenty minutes from St. Vincent’s with my grandmother’s quilt folded across the second bed and Bennett’s sentence repeating inside my head.
There are papers we’re supposed to sign Friday.
At 6:12 the next morning, I called my attorney.
Not our attorney.
Mine.
Mara Donnelly had handled my grandmother’s estate four years earlier.
“Wren?”
“I need to know whether Bennett Shaw has contacted you about the Appleton property.”
Silence.
That was all the answer I needed.
“Mara.”
“He sent documents last week.”
My stomach turned.
“What documents?”
“A proposed easement, development participation agreement, and marital property acknowledgment.”
“Marital?”
“He said you two had discussed it.”
“We hadn’t.”
Another silence.
“I didn’t process anything.”
“Why?”
“Your grandmother made me promise I’d call you personally before any transfer involving that land.”
I closed my eyes.
Thank you, Grandma.
“What did Bennett tell you?”
“That after the wedding, you wanted to contribute the farmhouse acreage to a mixed-use development his firm is designing.”
“What development?”
Mara emailed me the proposal.
HARBOR RIDGE.
Hotels.
Luxury townhouses.
Retail.
A private medical complex.
Estimated value: $186 million.
My grandmother’s forty-three acres appeared on the map in yellow.
Not as an optional parcel.
As the center access corridor.
The main road went straight through her orchard.
I stared at it.
Without my land, half the project had no practical entrance from the highway.
Bennett didn’t merely want my farmhouse.
He needed it.
My phone rang.
Dad.
I answered.
“Come to breakfast,” he said.
“No.”
“Wren, your mother is devastated.”
“She’s not my mother.”
I hated myself for saying it.
Diane had been my stepmother since I was thirteen.
But that morning, every relationship felt contaminated.
“Fine. Diane is devastated. Sloane is a mess. Bennett’s parents are flying in this afternoon.”
“Not my emergency.”
“You’re a nurse. Everything is an emergency to you.”
“Exactly. That’s why I recognize when something’s already dead.”
He went quiet.
Then:
“Bennett made a terrible mistake.”
“Several.”
“You don’t throw away seven years because of one betrayal.”
“Dad, what do you know about Harbor Ridge?”
Silence.
There it was again.
My father had become very bad at silence.
“How do you know about that?”
I sat up.
“So you knew.”
“I knew Bennett’s firm was interested in the property.”
“Interested?”
“He thought it could be good for everyone.”
“Everyone except Grandma’s farmhouse.”
“It’s an old house, Wren.”
I hung up.
At nine, someone knocked on my hotel door.
Cass, my wedding coordinator.
She carried coffee and looked furious on my behalf.
“I’m not here to ask what happened.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m here because I found something weird.”
She handed me copies of payment emails.
Six weeks earlier, Bennett had asked whether any wedding refunds could be deposited into the joint account his architectural firm had created for “post-marital property investments.”
I had never seen that account.
“I told him refunds go back to the original payer,” Cass said.
My hands went cold.
“He was preparing this before yesterday.”
“Yes.”
“And Sloane knew.”
Cass hesitated.
“There’s more.”
Of course there was.
“What?”
“Sloane called me three weeks ago.”
“About the wedding?”
“She asked what would happen to vendor deposits if the bride canceled.”
I stopped breathing.
“She specifically asked whether you would lose enough money to make canceling financially difficult.”
I stared at her.
The affair had not simply happened.
Sloane had already been thinking about what would happen when I found out.
And suddenly I had a much worse question.
May you like
If they expected me to discover the affair after Friday…
Who had planned the timing?
