My daughter Paige was twenty-six. Beautiful, educated, charming when she needed something.
She also had a remarkable talent for making other people’s sacrifices sound like inconveniences.
Her father, Frank, was worse.
We’d divorced eight months earlier, after I discovered he’d been hiding money and meeting another woman at a hotel near Columbus.
His explanation?
“You stopped making an effort, Celia.”
That was rich coming from a man who hadn’t washed a dinner plate since 1998.
The divorce cost me nearly twenty years of marriage, most of my savings, and whatever remained of my patience.
But I kept the farmhouse.
Dad had transferred it into my name years before I married Frank. The recorded deed was clear about that.
Frank knew it.
He hated it.
And Paige had apparently decided that helping her father get the house was more profitable than respecting her mother.
I didn’t know how far they were willing to go until Graham came back into my life.
