His Chubby Obsession

Chapter Nine: What He's Capable Of

Sofia found me in the kitchen the next morning, feeding Charlotte cereal one careful spoonful at a time, and set her laptop down on the table with the particular quiet of someone about to hand you something heavy.

"You should see this before you decide anything else about how safe you feel," she said.

Charlotte was humming to herself, kicking her feet against the chair legs, blissfully unaware, and some instinct made me stand and steer Sofia toward the far counter instead, out of earshot, out of the line of sight of a four-year-old who'd already absorbed more of her father's cruelty than any child should have to carry.

"What is it?"

"A pattern." Sofia turned the screen toward me. "A man named Aiden Cole. Four years ago, before you and Bruce were even married."

I read it standing up, one hand braced against the counter, because some part of me already knew I'd need the support before I finished the first paragraph. A business dispute. A bankruptcy that came too fast to be organic. A custody case that appeared out of nowhere, timed with surgical precision to a business collapse that had nothing to do with fatherhood at all.

"He did this," I said. It wasn't really a question.

"We can't prove it. Not yet. But it's exactly his signature — ruin someone publicly and privately, all at once, so clean it looks like bad luck instead of a campaign." Sofia's voice was steady, clinical, the voice of someone laying out facts because feelings would only slow down the work. "Enzo thinks — and I agree — that you need to understand what you're actually dealing with. This isn't a man who lost his temper once and you happened to be standing there. This is a strategy. You were part of it before you ever said yes to a first date."

I thought about the corner store. The suit that cost more than my monthly pay. The way he'd leaned against the counter and asked about coffee like it was nothing, like I was nothing, one more convenient piece slotting into a plan that had probably already existed in some form before he'd ever walked through that door.

Papa Niel's face across that first family dinner. So you're the girl my grandson's been seeing. Your father's company is struggling. It wasn't a question. It had never been a question. It had been a checklist.

"I always knew there was something transactional about it," I said quietly. "I just told myself it didn't matter, because he chose me anyway. Out of everyone, he chose me." My laugh came out broken, nothing like a laugh at all. "God, I was so grateful to be chosen. Like being picked for a strategy was the same thing as being loved."

"You didn't know what you were being picked for."

"I didn't want to know." That was the truth, uglier than anything Sofia had shown me on that screen. "I had everything I needed to see it, if I'd let myself look. I just didn't want it to be true. It's easier to be someone's asset than to be nobody's anything. I learned that a long time before Bruce ever walked into that store."

Sofia didn't say anything to that, which I was grateful for. Some things don't need comforting. They just need to be said out loud, once, to someone who won't flinch.

I looked back at the screen, at Aiden Cole's ruined life laid out in dates and headlines, and felt something shift inside my chest — not fear exactly, though there was plenty of that too. Something colder. Clearer.

"If he did this to a business partner over money," I said slowly, "what is he willing to do to me? I'm not a deal gone sideways. I'm the thing standing between him and two point three billion dollars."

"That's what worries me," Sofia said.

—

I was still turning it over an hour later, watching Charlotte build a lopsided tower out of the mismatched blocks someone had scrounged up for her, when my burner phone — the one Sofia had given me, the one nobody outside this house should have had the number for — buzzed against the counter.

Unknown number. Local area code.

My stomach dropped straight through the floor. I stared at it ringing, second guessing every choice I'd made in the last three days that could possibly have led this number back to me.

"Don't answer it," Sofia said, appearing in the doorway like she'd sensed the shift in the air.

"What if it's important? What if — "

"Nothing about a call to a number only four people know is a coincidence." Her voice had gone hard, controlled. "Let it go to voicemail."

It rang out. A moment later, the little notification blinked up: one new voicemail.

I played it on speaker, Sofia leaning in close, both of us barely breathing.

"Emma? Emma, honey, it's — it's Mom." My mother's voice, thin and strange through the cheap speaker, cracking in a way I'd rarely heard from her, not even at my own wedding. "I don't — I don't know if this is even your number anymore, I got it from — someone gave it to me, I'm sorry, I don't — please, sweetheart, just call me back. I need to talk to you. It's important. Please, Emma."

The message ended. Silence rang in its place, louder somehow than her voice had been.

"How," I said, and couldn't finish the sentence, because there was no good end to it. How did my mother, who barely used her own cell phone without help, get a number I'd had for exactly three days, given to me by a woman she'd never met, in a house she didn't know existed?

Sofia's jaw had gone tight in a way I was starting to recognize as her thinking-fast face.

"Somebody gave that number to your mother," she said slowly. "Which means somebody who has it talked to her. Which means either your mother has resources we don't know about — "

"She doesn't. She's never had a resource in her life that wasn't handed to her by my father, or by Bruce's family, or — " I stopped. The floor tilted a little under me. "Or somebody gave it to Bruce first. And he gave it to her. Because he knew I'd never ignore a call from my own mother."

Sofia didn't argue with the logic, because there wasn't a hole in it to argue with.

I stood there in that kitchen, holding a phone I'd been told no one could trace, listening to my own mother's frightened, pleading voice replay itself over and over in my head, and understood with a sick, sinking certainty that Bruce hadn't needed to find me at all.

He'd found the people who loved me instead, and let them do the finding for him.