Page 47

Rebecca

I can’t control myself any longer. I reach over and grab the wheel, yank it as hard as I can to the right, sending us flying off the road and into the soft dirt shoulder. Marsden’s elbow crashes into my lip.

“You’ll pay for that.”

He slams the brakes so hard I can hear the bones in the back of my neck crack when my head whips forward.

Marsden opens the driver’s-side door and runs over to me, but I have just enough time to do what I need to do. I reach into my back pocket for the burner phone Olivia bought me at Walmart, and without taking it out, I press the button that will dial the last number I called.

Kiki.

I keep it open and tuck it smoothly in the back of my underwear, sliding it down as far as it will go in the hopes he won’t see it. I only need a minute, maybe less. It’s the only way I can tell anyone what’s happening to me.

Before I know what he’s doing I’m being dragged out of the car.

“Where the hell are we going? Are you taking me home to the ranch? Marsden, answer me.”

Those were the only three things I needed to reveal before the phone fell into the dirt and I kicked it under the truck.

My hands are pinned behind my back with a zip tie. Marsden shoves me back into the passenger seat and binds my ankles and then replaces my seat belt. I don’t know why he didn’t just throw me in the bed of his truck, other than I think he wants to toy with me as we continue the drive.

When we’re back on the road he can’t stop talking.

“Your children deserve a mother who can truly take care of them. It’s clear that you can’t do it.

It has been for some time. Gray knew it, I think.

He prayed about it. The whole church was praying about it.

Your children need role models who are strong in their faith, strong in their morals.

You’ve never been strong. Veronica is a strong woman.

That’s where your children will be. My wife will keep them safe.

She knows how to raise morally sound children of God.

Thank god Gray chose Veronica and me as their godparents.

It will make all of this so much easier. ”

“Oh my god.” I gasp, my thoughts running in panicked circles.

He’s right. I’d fought Gray on that decision years ago, but I also didn’t have a good substitute for his best friend and his best friend’s wife.

I had no family, no friends I was in touch with.

I’d agreed, thinking it was such a long shot.

Both of us wouldn’t go at the same time.

It wasn’t possible. But I had planned to switch it.

I had the new document all drawn up and ready.

It said that the kids would go to Kiki and Juan Carlos if anything were to ever happen to us.

I’d planned to make Gray sign it using the confessions I’d hoped to get out of him. But obviously that didn’t happen and the document remains unsigned. Mars and Veronica will get our children if something terrible happens to me tonight.

“It’s so fitting,” he says. “I’ll get to raise all of my children under one roof.

It’s what the Lord always intended. We just didn’t know it at the time.

But he works in mysterious ways and he always provides exactly what we need.

They’ll miss you, I’m sure. But they’ll forget.

Kids do. And Veronica will be such a wonderful mother. The mother they deserve.”

What does Veronica know about any of this?

Was she complicit in Marsden offering my husband his sperm?

As a mother, I can’t believe she could let me go through what I did.

I bite down hard on my lip to keep myself from screaming because I can’t have him hit me again.

I need to be as present as possible, as strong as possible, to deal with whatever comes next, because the only way this man is taking my children from me is over my dead body and I won’t let that happen.

I have to control myself. I know that, but somehow the words slip out. Maybe they’ll catch him off guard. “I’m surprised you feel that way after what happened with her and Gray.”

He nearly drives off the road then. I knew it would screw with him. It did that night in the barn, the night when he murdered his best friend in cold blood. When I watched him kill Gray, when my plan led to my husband’s murder.

It was my fault. I put the two of them together in the barn that night. I needed their confessions. I needed them on tape. The emails weren’t enough. Emails can be faked. Words can’t.

So I planned for Gray and Marsden to meet out there the night I spent with Lizzie at the conference.

I wanted them to think they were alone so they could have it out.

I’d placed the cameras in there so I could record their entire conversation.

I needed to have it all on the record that Grayson and Marsden colluded to trick me.

And once I had that proof I could properly make my escape.

I’d tell them I’d go public. I’d ruin them.

Ruin Dr. Carmichael. Ruin the church. But I would only do it if they didn’t let me and the kids go.

That’s all I wanted—freedom.

The planning had been exhausting, but planning was my full-time job as a mother and content creator. I was used to it. I tried to think of the recording I was hoping to capture as just another piece of content. How could I get it perfectly?

Men never talk on the phone. I just sent Marsden a text from Gray’s phone and then deleted it. I made a dummy email account for Marsden and emailed my husband. I knew there wouldn’t be much back-and-forth after they agreed to meet up, but I kept an eye on it.

The barn is their favorite place to hang out together.

Both of them hate being in the house with the kids crawling all over them for much longer than an hour or so.

In the barn there’s a dartboard where Mars and Gray have been playing the same game for a decade, the score constantly updated in scratch marks on the wall with a bowie knife kept out there for that specific reason.

They smoke cigars when they play, something I’ve always ignored, but I gag when I go out to milk the cows for at least a week afterward because the stench of cigar smoke never truly goes away.

In the hours leading up to their rendezvous I sent Marsden the real reason I wanted them to get together.

An ironclad contract for him relinquishing all parental rights to my children.

I also sent over the DNA tests and the disgusting emails my husband had sent to Veronica.

I made it clear that I would publicly destroy both of them.

All I wanted was his silence and my babies.

I got Marsden’s text right after I left Lizzie’s room.

You won’t get away with this you fucking bitch.

They came from G, or Marsden Greer. I kept him in my contacts as that because I hated seeing his stupid name. I could abide by just the one letter on the few occasions we communicated.

I ignored it. He and Gray would have plenty to talk about in the barn and that’s exactly what I wanted.

That’s when I went to Dan’s. I was wound so tight. I needed a release. I needed comfort. It was quick.

I was back in my suite when I watched the live video feed from our barn.

I knew they’d meet after ten p.m . because Marsden wouldn’t come over until the baseball game was finished.

I’d spent a lot of money to set up a surveillance camera and microphone in the rafters that no one would detect.

It was all too easy to order on the Internet.

Home security systems are now at the level of CIA espionage tools.

It all operated over Wi-Fi and streamed to my phone.

It was the audio I cared about the most. I wanted them to have it out about what they had both done. I wanted proof in their own words.

I sat in my room and saw it all on my phone the same exact way my nine million followers have watched my family and me for a decade. Because of that none of it felt real at first.

I watched as Marsden came into the barn drunk and seething with rage. Gray was confused and caught off guard from the very start. He’d been tossing darts. He had no idea what Marsden knew. He just stood there smoking a Cuban.

When Mars came in Gray offered him a cigar, but his friend smacked it out of his hand.

I’d wanted them to discuss the children and the horrible thing they’d done.

I wanted all the details revealed. But I’d made a mistake trying to catch Mars off guard with the emails Gray sent to his wife.

I’d meant to drive a rift between the two of them from the start, but it became Marsden’s singular focus.

I could hear the two of them so clearly I felt like I was in the barn with them.

“Did you think I wouldn’t find out about the pervy emails you’ve been sending my wife?” Marsden shouted. “I knew you wanted her, but I didn’t think you had the balls to try to do it. You really think she’d go for it? You think she’d choose a limp dick like you over a man like me?”

“What are you talking about, man?”

Gray denying it only infuriated Marsden more.

That’s when Marsden punched him right in the jaw. Gray attempted to fight back. He grabbed the bowie knife from where it hung on the wall over the dartboard and slashed at Mars’s face, but he missed. They ripped at each other’s clothes. At one point Gray’s shirt just sort of fell off his body.

The bird’s-eye view from the camera perched in the rafters was like watching amateur ultimate fighters go at each other.

It seemed evenly matched at first, but that was impossible. Marsden was a professional athlete and I always suspected that he took things to enhance his performance on the field.

They wrestled. Gray gouged at Marsden’s eyes, begging for the two of them to stop and to talk. He denied ever being with Veronica, apologized for the emails, said they were all a dumb joke.

Marsden delivered a kick directly to Gray’s left kneecap, causing him to buckle to the floor.