A Week After Mom’s Death, That Jerk Fell for Someone Else

Today was Halloween. It was also the seventh day since my mother’s death. My fiancé, Lucas Reed, suddenly leaned close to my ear. “Your mom didn’t die from her illness. She choked to death on a pumpkin hand pie.” I trembled as I stared at the man I’d always thought was so gentle and refined. “Chloe and I were behind the curtain in her hospital room. We got a little loud.” “Your mom fell out of bed trying to get a better look. Choked to death on that pork-and-egg pie in her mouth.” Chloe was the young caregiver my mother had adored. She was also the “perfect daughter” Mom had always compared me to. Lucas looked at my bloodless face and gave a mocking smile. “Don’t blame me. Blame your mother for always being so hard on you—and insisting on making Chloe her goddaughter.” “Besides, you’re not even half as good in bed as Chloe. You just lie there like a dead fish.” “Chloe and I are getting married next week.” “Make plenty of those pumpkin pies your mom loved. We’ll give them out as wedding favors.” Lucas’s words pierced my ears. He was about to say more when a slender figure rushed toward us. She didn’t even look at me. She went straight into his arms. “Lucas, don’t talk about Claire that way.” Then she turned toward me, tears glistening in her eyes. “Claire, please don’t blame Lucas. This is all my fault. Your mom was so good to me. I just couldn’t help myself.” Couldn’t help herself. My mother was barely cold in her grave. They’d screwed in her hospital room, and now they were embracing at her memorial. I lunged at her. Before I could touch her, Lucas shoved me away. He stood over me, looking down. Several distant relatives were still in the room. Every one of them turned to stare at me. Lucas didn’t raise his voice, but everyone heard him clearly. “Claire Bennett, look at yourself. Screaming and carrying on like a shrew.” “Am I wrong? A woman like you has no idea how to please a man. You’re a dead fish.” The sympathy in my relatives’ eyes slowly turned to contempt—and eager curiosity. Chloe slipped out of Lucas’s arms and walked to the memorial table. She picked up one of the savory pumpkin hand pies I’d made myself, filled with pork and salted egg, just the way Mom had loved them. Right in front of me, she peeled back the orange paper wrapper. “Lucas, Evelyn always said my pies tasted better than Claire’s. Try one.” Lucas took it without so much as glancing at me and bit off a huge mouthful. Still chewing, he mumbled, “Yours are definitely better.” Then he shoved the rest straight into Chloe’s mouth. Her cheeks bulged. With her mouth full, she gave him a sweet, bashful smile. I shook all over. Tears blurred my vision. I turned to Uncle Robert, my mother’s older brother. “Uncle Robert, look at what they’re doing.” I pleaded through my tears, hoping he would say something for me. For Mom. His lips moved, but in the end, he only turned away and let out a heavy sigh. “Claire, stop being difficult.” “Lucas is holding our family’s food company together. We can’t afford to lose him.” That single sentence plunged me into ice. Lucas sneered. He came over and wiped his mouth. “Hear that? Holding it together.” “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I’ve already launched our new product line.” “I’m renaming the brand your mom founded. Hart’s Kitchen is becoming Chloe & Lucas Gourmet.” Chloe and Lucas. Her name. His name. They were going to turn my mother’s life’s work into a monument to their “love.” He bent down and hauled me off the floor. “I give you an inch, and you actually think you’re still the princess of the Hart family?” The candles flickered around my mother’s portrait. Alone, with no one on my side, I looked at them. Then I looked at Mom’s stern face in the photograph. I hadn’t just lost my mother. I’d lost everything connected to her.The next day, I returned to Hart Foods, the company my mother had built from nothing. This place should have been home. Instead, two security guards stopped me outside the entrance. “Sorry, Ms. Bennett. Mr. Reed’s orders. No unauthorized visitors.” Unauthorized. I was an unauthorized visitor at my own family’s company. Anger burned in my chest. The moment the guards looked away, I charged inside like a woman possessed. I kicked open the door to my mother’s office. Chloe was sitting in the executive chair. She was wearing my mother’s favorite embroidered silk dress. Far from panicking when she saw me, Chloe deliberately stood up and gave a slow turn. Her pale thigh flashed through the high slit. “Look, Claire.” She stroked the delicate embroidery, smiling. “Don’t you think Evelyn’s dress fits me better?” “She always said you slouched too much. You didn’t have the poise to carry off fabric this beautiful.” I was shaking so hard with rage that I couldn’t speak. Then the office door opened, and Walter Brooks, the company’s attorney, walked in. He handed me a document. “Ms. Bennett, this is the agreement you signed last week, transferring your shares without compensation. Legally speaking, you no longer own the company.” My mind went blank as I took it. There it was in black and white. My signature, clear as day. I froze. Lucas had brought me a document the week before. He’d said it was a prenuptial property agreement to reassure Mom and prove he wasn’t after our money. I’d actually been touched by his “thoughtfulness.” He’d already been setting his trap. I jerked my head up and looked at Walter. “Walter, you were practically my father’s brother. You watched me grow up! How could you help them trick me?” A flicker of guilt crossed his cloudy eyes, then vanished. Avoiding my gaze, he said quietly, “Claire, don’t make a scene. Lucas is doing what’s best for the company. You’re young. You don’t understand business.” “She doesn’t understand business?” An icy voice came from the doorway. Lucas walked in and casually slipped an arm around Chloe’s waist. He gave me a contemptuous glance. “For your mother’s sake, I can offer you a job washing dishes in the company cafeteria. Two thousand a month, meals and a room included. Interested?” “You—” Chloe tugged on his sleeve, putting on a concerned face. “Lucas, don’t talk to Claire like that.” As she spoke, she took a box from my mother’s desk drawer. My heart clenched. It was my childhood treasure box. Chloe opened it and pulled out a battered little cookbook I’d drawn by hand. Smiling, she turned to the pumpkin pie page. My childish, crooked handwriting read, “Mommy loves my pies best.” Chloe acted as if she’d found the funniest joke in the world. “You were so naïve, Claire.” “Evelyn told me eating your food was torture. She only forced it down because she didn’t want to hurt your feelings.” No. That wasn’t true. Mom had told me she liked my cooking. Lucas snatched the cookbook from Chloe. Right in front of me, he slowly tore it apart, one page at a time. The words “Mommy loves” split in two. Then into countless pieces. That was my childhood. The last little scrap of warmth I had left from my mother. Now it was shredded. “Throw her out,” Lucas ordered coldly. The two guards rushed in and seized my arms. They dragged me away, then dumped me outside the glass doors like a bag of trash. The sunshine was blinding. But I felt cold all over.Every relative shut their door on me. Uncle Robert sighed over the phone and told me I couldn’t beat Lucas. I should accept my fate. The others wouldn’t even answer. With the few hundred dollars I had left, I rented a room at a cheap motel in a run-down neighborhood. I lay awake all night. Eventually, I connected to the motel’s Wi-Fi, hoping to see what was happening beyond those four walls. That was when I realized the world hadn’t simply abandoned me. It had nailed me to a public wall of shame. The number-one trending topic was: #HeiressDrivesMotherToDeath I tapped it and found a carefully edited video. It opened with me standing beside Mom’s hospital bed, raising my voice at her impatiently. Then it cut to Chloe holding a sugary milkshake, gently guiding the straw to Mom’s lips. Next came the footage of me lunging toward Chloe at the memorial, labeled as an “attack on a kindhearted caregiver.” The part where Lucas shoved me to the floor had been cut. With mournful music playing underneath, I became an abusive, ungrateful daughter consumed by jealousy. I’d raised my voice because Mom’s blood sugar was dangerously high. Her doctor had ordered dietary restrictions, but she insisted on drinking the sugary shakes Chloe brought her. She even complained that my homemade broth was bland. I’d argued with her because I wanted to protect her health. Now everyone saw it as undeniable proof that I’d abused her. I opened Lucas’s social media profile. In the early hours of the morning, he’d posted a statement thousands of words long. He painted himself as a long-suffering victim, exploited for years by a spoiled heiress. His affair with Chloe became a brave pursuit of true love. The cruelest part was what he said about Mom’s death. According to him, years of emotional abuse from me had driven her into depression and destroyed her health. He was the devoted almost-son who had quietly cared for her, only to fail to save her in the end. The comments overflowed with sympathy and praise. Meanwhile, furious strangers had taken over every one of my accounts. Someone had even posted my home address. With nowhere else to go, I finally fled to the old house Mom had left behind. It was my last refuge. The living room and bedrooms had been ransacked. I knew Lucas and Chloe had been there, looking for something. Numb, I walked into the study. It was just as wrecked. Books covered the floor. Mom’s favorites had been tossed into a corner like garbage. I crouched to pick them up, but tears kept falling. Then a painting on the wall caught my eye. It was a simply framed painting called *The Halloween Regatta*. It had always hung in the least noticeable spot beside the bookcase. Now the frame sat crooked from the search, exposing a sliver of metal behind it. My heart skipped. I walked over, straightened the frame, then carefully lifted it off the wall. An old combination safe was built into the plaster. It was small, with a carved boat decorating its door. Mom… what had she been hiding? My fingers trembled as I tried the combination. My birthday. Wrong. Mom’s birthday. Wrong. The day she died. The day Dad died. The anniversary of our move… I tried every date I could think of. The safe wouldn’t budge. Then a piercing alarm shrieked through the empty house. I dropped to the floor, half my hope gone.The moment the alarm sounded, my phone began vibrating wildly. I answered. Lucas’s laughter poured through the speaker. “Claire, I’m the one who installed the security system in that old house.” “The alarm calls my phone automatically.” “So? Found the safe that old hag left behind?” Loud music and celebratory cheers filled the background. “Turn on the TV,” he said smugly. “Take a look.” I pulled myself up against the wall and switched on the study television with shaking hands. A lavish brand launch was being broadcast live. CHLOE & LUCAS GOURMET glittered across the stage backdrop. Chloe stood under the spotlights in Mom’s silk dress. Facing the cameras, she wept prettily. “I promise to fulfill my godmother’s final wish and carry on the spirit of Hart’s Kitchen.” “I’ll make this brand stronger than ever, so she can rest in peace.” Thunderous applause filled the room. Then Lucas joined her onstage and wrapped an arm around her. In front of the assembled press, he announced: “Chloe & Lucas Gourmet will establish a charitable foundation supporting mothers who have lost their only children.” The camera moved in for a close-up. “As the foundation’s first event, we’ll be holding a memorial dinner tomorrow night for my mother-in-law, Evelyn Hart.” “We will also ‘invite’ her biological daughter, Claire Bennett, to become our first participant in an act of repentance.” “At the dinner, she will kneel before her mother’s portrait and publicly apologize for her sins.” I screamed into the phone. “In your dreams, Lucas!” His laughter grew louder. “In my dreams? Claire, want to guess what I have?” “I have the complete security footage of your mom falling out of bed, struggling on the floor while nobody helped her.” “Choking to death on that pie.” I stopped breathing. “What if I posted it with the sounds Chloe and I were making behind the curtain?” “Think those righteous little internet warriors would tear you apart?” “They’d say her ungrateful daughter drove her to her death.” He hung up. The study went silent except for my ragged breathing. I collapsed in front of the safe, tears streaming down my face. My thoughts were chaos. Lucas’s threats. Chloe’s tears. The image of my mother dying in agony. Then something Mom used to scold me with surfaced from the depths of my memory. “One measure wrong, one minute short, not ten parts heart! You’ll never learn to make a decent pie!” Those words had followed me like a curse since childhood. Every time I proudly brought her a batch I’d made with such care, I heard the same harsh criticism. I’d always thought she was hopelessly disappointed in me. But now— One measure. One minute. Ten parts heart. My eyes flew wide. Not numbers. The combination wasn’t numbers. It was words. I reached out with trembling fingers and turned the old safe’s lettered dials, one letter at a time. A click. The safe sprang open. There was no cash or jewelry inside. No property deeds. Only a notebook, a flip phone, and a seal. A single name was engraved into the base in bold, elegant lettering. Claire. I picked up the black notebook and opened to the first page. Mom’s familiar handwriting stared back at me. “Claire, if you’re reading this, it means I’ve lost. My unexpected death has left you trapped.” “But don’t be afraid.” “Mom’s game has only just begun.”