Chapter 3 - The Name on the Paint ChipThat following Monday, Birdie climbed up onto my lap while I folded laundry. "Vivienne, do I get to bring my toys to the pretty house?"
My hands stopped moving over one of her small T-shirts. "What exactly do you mean, sweetheart?"
"Daddy said there's going to be a whole room just for me there." She smiled brightly. "The yellow lady showed me exactly which one it was."
A room for Birdie. Why exactly was my husband's own daughter getting a bedroom inside a house I'd never once heard about?
"Did Daddy say who else is going to actually live there?"
Birdie shook her head. "He said it's a secret."
That same night, I walked past our closet and spotted the old Farm Fund folder sticking out from the bottom drawer, the tab still written in my own mother's handwriting. My own money had gone into that house somehow. Now Foster was apparently building a bedroom there for his daughter. I shut the drawer so hard the whole frame rattled loudly.
I grabbed my phone and called Odessa immediately. "I can't wait any longer. I need to know exactly who that house is actually for."
"Vivienne..."
"Birdie has a bedroom there, Odessa."
If I was wrong about all of this, I was about to cross a line I genuinely couldn't uncross afterward. If I was right, my marriage was already, entirely over. Odessa sighed heavily. "I'm coming with you, then."
Saturday night, I told Foster that Odessa and I were finally having the girls' night we'd missed before the wedding, and that I'd stay over at her place. He kissed my forehead and told me to genuinely have fun.
Instead, Odessa picked me up, and we drove straight to the address we'd traced through the bank transfers. The house sat at the end of a long gravel road. We photographed the mailbox first, then a contractor's sign posted near the drive. "That's enough," Odessa whispered. "We have the address now. Let's go."
Then I saw the side of the house itself. Renovation plastic covered what should have been a solid wall, but one section had come pulled loose. Through the gap, I could clearly see a half-finished kitchen inside. Yellow cabinets. Exactly what Birdie had described to me earlier.
"Odessa."
"Vivienne, don't."
I moved closer anyway and lifted my phone to photograph the kitchen and the stacked moving boxes nearby. Then I spotted an open bedroom door down the hallway. A paint chip clipped to the doorframe had one single name written across it. BIRDIE. Seeing her actual name written there felt considerably worse, somehow, than seeing Whitney's name on those bank transfers had.
My hand went cold around my own phone. "That's her name."
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Odessa stepped closer. "Vivienne..."
A light above us snapped on suddenly. Then an alarm started screaming through the whole property.
