Chapter 1
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“If you leave this house, take all three of them with you. Don’t leave a single one of them here with me.”
Gareth stood up from his leather armchair, pointing a sharp finger toward our three children as if they were nothing more than misplaced moving boxes waiting to be divided up.
Beside him on the couch, my mother-in-law, Gertrude, burst into a sharp laugh.
“Yes, take them all away so we can finally have some quiet around here,” Gertrude sneered, taking a sip from her teacup.
Nineteen years of marriage were behind us. For nineteen long years, I had woken up every day before five in the morning to prepare breakfast, press school uniforms, pack lunchboxes, drive Gertrude to her endless doctor appointments, stretch every single dollar of our household budget, and work late into the night at my computer.
And that cold statement was my ultimate reward for all of those sacrifices.
“Okay,” I said softly, looking directly into my husband’s eyes.
My eldest son, Brendan, who was seventeen years old, slowly set his fork down against his plate with a light clink.
“Dad, Grandma, are you completely sure about this decision?” Brendan asked, his voice steady. “Make sure you don’t regret saying that later on.”
Gareth pulled his brows together, glaring at him across the dining table. “What kind of tone is that to use with your father?”
“It is not a tone at all,” Brendan replied, looking completely unfazed. “I just want to make sure you remember every single word you just said.”
At that moment, I did not fully understand why Brendan remained so calm while the entire family was falling apart around us. I would only understand his quiet confidence much later on.
My name is Abigail Shepherd, I am forty-three years old, and I am a licensed accountant. I live in Phoenix, Arizona, and for almost two decades I truly believed that keeping a family together meant enduring every silent injustice thrown my way.
My husband Gareth was forty-six and worked full time in commercial industrial equipment sales. Our children were Brendan, who was seventeen, Chloe, who was fourteen, and Paige, who was ten. Gertrude had been living under our roof for seven long years, ever since her husband passed away. Ever since she moved into our spare bedroom, her medical visits, prescriptions, bills, grocery preferences, and even her petty disputes with the next-door neighbors became my exclusive responsibility.
Whenever I brought up the overwhelming workload, Gareth always offered the exact same lazy response.
“It is so much easier for you to ask for time off at your job than it is for me,” Gareth would say without looking up.
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I worked full time too, but in that house, my time simply seemed to be worth less than everyone else’s.
On top of my day job, I had spent the last eight years building something that nobody in that house had ever bothered to ask me about, which was a small independent accounting practice that I ran at night using my maiden name, Ledger Bookkeeping.
