He got into bed, the TV near Monica now on and playing a show on low volume.It might be good for us…She and Henry had not had much time for themselves since the in-laws arrived,and if there was one thing that kept the stress down, it was indulging in their favorite form of recreation.
Between this and the IRS…
Monica tapped her hairbrush onto her vanity and turned off the lights. As soon as she climbed into bed with her husband, she willed herself to stop thinking about the stress pressing in on her and wrapped her arm across Henry’s chest.
It didn’t take long for them to turn off the TV and pull the covers over their heads.
“No, we’renottaking this somewhere private! You can hear me tear your ass apart in front of everyone we employ!”
Monica had just come into the main house on her way to work, but the scene unfolding between Eva and Isabella was too bombastic to overlook. Especially when Eva was that red in her usually pale face and shaking a piece of paper at her mother.
“I can’t believe you…you…”
Isabella turned her nose up at her daughter. “Can’t believe Iwhat?Looked out for the best interests of this family?” She barely acknowledged Monica as she approached from behind. “Please. Look at you, Evangeline. Acting like achildto me. If you had half the sense I do, you would have done the same thingbeforemarrying your…” She struggled to spit out a word with as little vitriol as she espoused. “Wife.”
Monica’s brows arched on her forehead. She was about to detach herself from this confrontation when Eva bypassed her mother and handed Monica the wrinkled paper.
“Look what she’s done! Can you believe this?”
Monica didn’t want to get involved this soon before work, but here she was, sucked into Eva and Isabella’s drama.Plenty of myown to create with my mother-in-law.But she also had Eva’s trust, and that was an asset in Warren Manor.
“What am I looking at?” Monica cocked her head at Eva, who still burned fire in her eyes. “Is this a DNA test?”
“It’s Nadia’s! This witch paid my wife’s doctor to compile a genetic test from a sample!”
While Eva pivoted on her high heels with her hands shaking in the air, Isabella kept her cool, as if those were completely normal words for a woman to string together.
“You make it sound so insidious, Evangeline. Any matriarch such as myself would do the same thing. After all, if you plan on introducing Nadia’s genetics into this family sometime soon, we should know what we’re dealing with.” She glanced at Monica, who stood with the paper in her hand. “I would have done the same thing to you if you hadn’t gone and… well, become with child before the wedding. But we didn’t have to worry about that with Nadia, now did we?”
Her laughter bubbled beneath a tenuously stable surface.
“But if she did, there wouldn’t have been a wedding, now would there have been?”
“I swear to God!” Eva barked, spit hanging from her teeth and the fire in her eyes now liable to spread to the house walls. “Why can’t you benormal?Who talks about their daughter-in-law like that?”
“Normal? I’m sorry, are we pretending that either of you are normal?” Isabella snatched the paper out of Monica’s hand. “Because you aren’t. Which is whyIhave to be so diligent about the generation after you. My children may have gotten away from me, but I’ll be damned if my grandchildren are half as debaucherous as you two.”
Eva and Monica shared a silent look.“She’s talking about your daughter!”Those were the words licking Eva’s eyelashes as theycoiled from her irises to the whites of her eyes.“And my not-yet-born kid!”
These were the times when Monica envied Nadia, who didn’t have to be around for this mess. She was still at work, sure, but she was neither Isabella’s flesh and blood daughter, nor the heir-apparent for the faux-title Lady Warren.She has to show me a modicum of respect because I’m her precious son’s wife and the mother of her golden granddaughter.But Monica knew that she was not truly respected, just like Nadia knew she never had a chance of gaining Isabella’s favor, and Eva needed biweekly therapy and the same doctor on speed dial because her mother had driven her to a nervous breakdown at sixteen.
“I had to ensure that there was nothing we should be concerned about in your partner’s medical history.” Isabella adjusted the fashion scarf around her neck with a naughty sniff. “You never know what ticking time bomb diseases might be in someone.”
“Bullshit! You wanted to see if she was more than 2% African!”
“I don’t have to tolerate this.” Isabella hastily zipped up her purse. Was she on her way out somewhere? “For years, you have been a hysterical thorn in my side, Evangeline. It’s like you refuse to understand what’s at stake in this family!”
“Hysterical. She callsmehysterical.”
Monica curtly shook her head at Eva when the woman was about to sink her vampiric histrionics into her mother’s throat. Instead, Eva hid a scream behind her palms.
“What exactly is at stake?” Monica calmly asked. “Surely, you wouldn’t furtively get a genetic panel done on Nadia if you weren’t concerned about something in particular.” She knew better than to give a woman like Isabella the benefit of the doubt when it came to ethnic backgrounds, but she had specifically called out health abnormalities. Was there something to that? Even in Isabella’s crazy way?
Isabella considered her with caution. Clearly, Monica had laid a trap to ensconce Isabella’s special brand of bigoted.
“This family is small and depleting,” Isabella warned. “Despite me having two children, Gerald has no siblings, nor did his father. The Warrens are hanging by a tenuous thread since long beforeIcame into the picture.” She scoffed at the way Eva looked at her. “Don’t give me that. My mother-in-law was in a nursing home by the time I married your father. She couldn’t give me any advice. Couldn’t tell me what was at stake, what I had to do besides the obvious. I’ve had to maintain this family even through your father’s gambling and owing half of our lives to some of the most unscrupulous characters you’ve ever met. There is a proud legacy in this family. We would have lost thishomeif it weren’t for your father finally seeing sense and moving with me to Montana. Henry has steered the financial ship around. It’s up to us women to get our numbers up so this never happens again!”
“Is this about me not having a son?” Monica asked.
