“Come sit on the couch,” I said to Ethan. “I’m going to make you something to eat.”
“I’m not hungry, Grandma.”
“I didn’t ask if you were hungry. I said I’m going to make you something.”
He managed a weak smile and collapsed onto the brown fabric sofa. It was old, but comfortable. I had bought it at a secondhand market fifteen years ago, and it still held up.
I went to the kitchen and heated milk. I prepared two cups of hot chocolate, the way my mother taught me when I was a girl. I cut a piece of the chocolate chip cake I had bought the day before at the local bakery two blocks away.
I returned to the living room with everything on a tray. Ethan took the cup in his hands and sipped. He closed his eyes, savoring it. For a moment, he seemed to forget everything that had happened.
“Thank you, Grandma.”
“Eat slowly. Then I’ll give you something for the pain in your eyebrow.”
I sat beside him and drank my chocolate in silence. Outside, the city was beginning to wake up. You could hear the first trucks, the whistle of the man selling bagels on the corner, the barking of the neighbor’s dog on the second floor.
“Grandma,” Ethan said after a while, “can I stay with you?”
“Of course. For as long as you need.”
“No, I mean… forever. I don’t want to go back to that house. Not with her there.”
I placed my cup on the coffee table and looked at him.
“Ethan, legally your father has custody. I can only have you temporarily until the case is resolved. If you want to stay with me permanently, we’ll have to do things properly—with lawyers, with judges.”
“But my dad will never agree.”
“We don’t know until we try.”
He shook his head.
“He does everything Chelsea tells him. Since they got married, it’s like my dad is a different person. Do you know what I heard a week ago?”
“What did you hear?”
Ethan lowered his voice as if someone could hear us.
“They were in their room. I was going to the bathroom and passed their door. It was slightly ajar. Chelsea was talking on the phone with someone. She was saying, ‘Don’t worry. Everything is going according to plan. When the old lady dies, Rob will inherit the house. We’ll sell it and get at least $4,500,000. With that and what I’ve already saved, we’ll go to Miami. We’ll open the hotel we always dreamed of. And the kid… we’ll send him to a military boarding school in San Diego. Let someone else deal with him.’”
I felt the blood boil inside me.
“Are you sure of what you heard?”
“Completely sure, Grandma. That’s why… that night when I came home late and she attacked me, I knew it was part of her plan. She wants to push me away from you. She wants you to see me as a problem. She wants my dad to see me that way, too. And when I’m no longer in the way, all that’s left is to wait for you.”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. Chelsea was planning my death. Or at least she was waiting for me to die soon. And in the meantime, she was going to destroy any bond that existed between my son and me. Between Ethan and his father.
“Did you say anything to your father?”
“I tried. The next day when Chelsea went to the hair salon, I told him what I had heard. Do you know what he told me? That I was making things up because I couldn’t accept that he moved on with his life. That I was a resentful teenager. That Chelsea had been very patient with me and that I was just trying to make her look bad.”
The helplessness I felt in that moment was crushing. My own son—the boy I had raised to be fair and honest—was completely blinded.
“You are not making anything up, Ethan. And I believe every word.”
He leaned his head on my shoulder and sighed.
“Why does she hate us so much, Grandma?”
