Page 131 of The Housekeeper

Chapter Fifty-one

The evening wentfrom bad to worse.

At approximately eight-thirty, Elyse announced that dinner was ready, and told everyone to help themselves to the buffet she’d set up on the dining room table. There were a variety of salads and several large platters of homemade lasagna, as well as generous helpings of shrimp and poached salmon.

The thought of food made me sick, so I remained in the living room while the others lined up with their plates.

“You’re not eating anything?” a voice asked from behind me.

“Not hungry,” I said, eyes staring resolutely ahead.

“My mother’s a wonderful cook. You really should eat something.”

“You should go fuck yourself,” I said.

He laughed. “I’d rather fuck you,” he whispered, brushing past me on his way to the dining room.

“Oh, God.” I felt my knees go weak and my legs about to collapse under me.

“Are you okay?” Tracy asked moments later, returning to the living room with a single, large piece of salmon on her plate. “You look kind of sick.” She inched away from me. “You’re not coming down with anything, are you?”

“Too much champagne,” I said, as I’d said earlier.

“Then you should probably eat something,” Harrison said, joining us, his plate filled to overflowing. “Say what you will about Elyse, she knows her way around a kitchen.”

“She knows her way around, period,” Tracy said. “Her son’s kind of cute, though. What do you think—I marry him, and collect no matter what.”

I felt another flash of nausea. “I’d stay away from him,” I warned. “He looks like trouble.”

“I like trouble,” Tracy countered.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I need to use the washroom.”

I quickly made my way to the powder room under the stairs to the right of the elevator. The door was closed, so I knocked.

“One minute,” Stephanie Pickering responded, her voice as distinctive as her helmet of blond hair and impressive cleavage. She emerged a few seconds later. “Lovely evening,” she said when she saw me. “Did you try the lasagna? Best I’ve ever tasted.”

“I’ll have to try some.”

She leaned in toward me. “Work on your father a bit, will you?” she urged. “He’s not getting any younger, and Elyse confided to me that the house is getting a bit much for her to handle.”

“Elyse said that the house is too much for her to handle?”

Stephanie brought her fingers to her lips. “Don’t say anything. She told me in confidence. And they’re really sitting on a gold mine here.”

A gold mine that Elyse, a gold digger if ever there was one, couldn’t wait to get her hands on, I thought, as I entered the powder room and locked the door after me. I lowered the lid on the toilet and sat down, trying to clear my head.

I knew that according to Ontario law, without a prenup, the house was now deemed the marital home and considered communal property and thus half the house already belonged to Elyse. If my father could be persuaded to sell it, that meant Elysewould have access to all that cash, and could potentially walk away with everything.

It wasn’t that I begrudged Elyse what was rightfully hers. If she were to stay with my father for the rest of his life, be it two more years, or five, or ten, or even more, and take care of him, make him happy, then more power to her. She deserved whatever she could get.

But I knew that this wasn’t the case. And I feared that my father was at risk, that he could actually be in danger.

“Oh, God,” I cried into my hands, not sure what Roger’s being here meant. I knew only two things for sure: one was that I needed answers; the other was that I had no idea how to get them.

I stayed in the powder room until I felt I could carry on a conversation without bursting into tears. Then I flushed the toilet, in case someone was waiting on the other side, and opened the door.

Rachael Miller was standing there. “Are you all right?” she asked, her face a mask of concern that barely hid the rebuke in her voice. “You were in there a very long time.”