“There’s someone else,” she had said.
Grant had been texting another woman—a pharmaceutical representative named Danielle—within two weeks of Colleen’s death. While Vivian was moving into the guesthouse and posting baby shoes online and imagining herself the woman at the center of the new life, Grant had already started a third chapter.
“I found the texts,” Vivian said. “The same way Colleen found mine.”
She laughed when she said it, but it sounded like glass cracking under pressure.
Then she handed Emmett audio recordings.
Conversations she had recorded on her phone over the previous two weeks.
Grant coaching her on what to say in court. Grant telling her to lie about how long they had been together. Grant explaining that he needed “a nurturing female presence” visible in the home because judges favored intact family optics.
That word—optics—hit Dorothy hardest when she heard it later.
Not children.
Not grief.
Not love.
Optics.
Vivian agreed to testify.
“I don’t forgive her,” Dorothy told Emmett after hearing all of it.
“No one asked you to.”
“She knew he was married.”
“Yes.”
“She walked into my daughter’s house.”
“Yes.”