“Explain,” he said, voice low and deadly calm. “Explain why my mother is on her knees eating garbage behind the trash cans on Thanksgiving.”
Emily clutched the spoon behind her back like a guilty child. “She—she started it, Jackson. She called me a gold-digging influencer who didn’t deserve you. I was just teaching her some respect.”
“Respect.” The word came out flat and cold. He knelt beside his mother, not caring that his Tom Ford suit soaked up the smell of spoiled gravy and wet leaves. He slipped an arm around her frail shoulders—God, he could feel every vertebra—and helped her stand.
“Mom, are you okay? Why didn’t you call me?”
Grandma Ruth shook her head, eyes glistening. “Didn’t wanna bother you, honey. You’re so busy. I thought Emily was just… joking.”
Something inside Jackson shattered—not at his wife’s cruelty, but at the fact he’d left his mother here to endure it alone.
He lifted her into his arms like she weighed nothing. The lilies lay crushed under the wheels of the garbage truck rumbling past the gate.
That night he locked himself in the security office in the basement and watched fourteen days of footage.
Every humiliating second.