“I knew it,” Molly hissed, her eyes flashing. “I never trusted that man for a single second. That charming, helpless, ‘I’m just a simple guy who loves a powerful woman’ routine he did? It was an act. He’s a parasite. He saw your money and he latched on.”
“He’s significantly worse than a parasite, Molly,” Jennifer’s voice crackled through the laptop speakers. She was sitting in her downtown office, surrounded by stacks of rapidly printed documents, looking more awake at midnight than most people do at noon. “He is a Trojan horse.”
On the screen, Jennifer shared a digitized file. It was a high-resolution scan of an old, faded photograph that I kept in a locked, fireproof drawer in my home office. It showed my late mother, Eleanor, standing proudly in front of the unfinished, muddy foundation of Redwood Crest nearly twenty-five years ago. Beside her was a man whose face had been violently, aggressively scratched out with the deep gouges of a ballpoint pen. I had asked her about it once as a child, and she had simply said he was an old business partner who forgot his place. I had never asked again.
