Chapter 7: Served

I didn't call him.

I screen-recorded the live until he ended it at 2:14.

Then I put the phone face down on the blanket and held my daughter until morning.

The cultures came back the next afternoon.

A common skin bug, in her line. The antibiotics were already killing it.

"She'll keep the port," Clara's doctor said. "She's lucky. You caught it early."

"Matt caught it."

"Matt usually does."

That evening, while Clara slept through her first normal temperature in two days, I found a lawyer.

The mom across the hall had used her for a custody fight in Kentucky and still had her number.

The lawyer was sixty, gravel-voiced, and called me back at nine at night from her car.

"Tell me the worst thing first," she said.

"He took forty-eight thousand dollars out of our daughter's transplant fund and gave it to his ex-girlfriend's fake cancer page."

There was a long silence.

"Okay," she said. "That's a pretty good worst thing."

By Wednesday afternoon a judge had signed an order freezing every joint account we had.

Brad couldn't move another dollar.

Neither could I, but I didn't need to. I had nothing left to move.

"Do you want to file?" the lawyer asked.

"Yes."

"Do you want him served at work? Most people do it at work. It's quieter."

"I don't want it quieter."

"Where, then?"

"Where he sleeps."

I knew Tasha's house.

I'd sat outside it twice in January, in the dark, with the engine running, and driven away both times without getting out.

It was a gray two-story in a cul-de-sac in Dublin, with a white wreath on the door and a lawn sign that said "Team Caden."

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Daughter Is Dying, and My Husband Is Saving His Lover's Son from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.