Chapter 4 - The Drive to Canandaigua
By one o'clock in the afternoon, the atmosphere inside the Maplewood Drive house had deteriorated into a state of hysterical chaos.
Lorraine had spent the past two hours alternating between screaming obscenities through my locked bedroom door, weeping hysterically into the living room sofa cushions, and frantically dialing Andrew’s cell phone every thirty seconds.
Unbeknownst to her, Andrew’s phone was currently being quietly intercepted and logged by Marcus Cole’s digital forensic team downtown, while Andrew himself remained blissfully unaware at our picturesque cottage near Canandaigua Lake, presumably believing his mother was successfully whipping me into domestic submission back in Rochester.
I stood in the entryway of the house, slipping on my structured black leather trench coat.
I picked up my car keys—keys to my personal Porsche Macan, purchased entirely with my own trust funds—and walked toward the front door.
Lorraine burst out of the living room, her hair disheveled, her mascara running in dark streaks down her cheeks, looking like a deranged ghost in her floral apron.
“Where do you think you’re going?!” she screeched, lunging forward and grabbing the sleeve of my trench coat with grimy fingers.
“You can't just leave me here! You can't throw me out on the street like a stray dog! I demand you call Andrew right this instant and straighten this out!”
I looked down at her hand clutching my sleeve, my expression an absolute mask of professional detachment.
Slowly, deliberately, I raised my right hand and peeled her fingers away one by one, tossing her hand aside as if it were contaminated biohazard waste.
“Take your hands off me, Lorraine,” I said, my voice carrying the lethal, surgical precision that had once kept terrified trauma patients from flatlining on emergency stretchers.
“You have exactly four hours to pack your personal belongings into cheap plastic garbage bags. Not designer luggage—garbage bags. Because at precisely five o'clock, the locks on this house are being completely rekeyed by a professional locksmith.”
Lorraine gasped, stumbling backward until her knees hit the edge of the hallway console table.
“You’re... you’re a monster!” she wailed, tears spraying from her eyes.
“Andrew will never forgive you for this! When he finds out—”
“When Andrew finds out what I know about his little business trips to Buffalo with Ms. Chloe Montgomery, he’s going to have much larger problems than where his mother is going to sleep tonight,” I interrupted coolly.
The color drained entirely from Lorraine’s face.
She froze mid-sob, her mouth opening and closing like a landed fish gasping for oxygen.
“You... you know about—” she choked out, her voice dropping to a terrified whisper.
“I know everything, Lorraine,” I said, opening the front door and stepping out onto the sunlit porch.
“And by five o'clock, your precious son is going to find out that cheating on a Vance is an extremely expensive hobby.”
I pulled the front door shut behind me with a solid, definitive thud, leaving the frantic pounding of my mother-in-law’s fists echoing uselessly against the thick oak panels.
I walked down the stone walkway, climbed into the driver’s seat of my Porsche, started the engine with a deep, throaty purr, and put the car into drive.
Destination: Canandaigua Lake.
It was time to pay my husband a very special birthday visit.
The drive down to Canandaigua Lake took a little over an hour, cutting through rolling upstate New York hills painted in brilliant shades of emerald green and early autumn gold.
As I drove, my mind remained ice-cold and razor-sharp.
I replayed the past seven years of my life like a medical review board analyzing a fatal surgical error, examining every warning sign, every convenient excuse, every financial discrepancy that I had previously forgiven out of misplaced loyalty and marital devotion.
Andrew had built an entire double life right under my nose, banking on the assumption that I was too meek, too focused on my nursing career, and too emotionally invested in our marriage to ever look beneath the surface.
He had treated my inheritance like an endless ATM machine to fund his lifestyle, his mother’s comfort, and his secret mistress in Buffalo.
Well, the audit was officially closed, and the bill was coming due.
As I turned my car onto the quiet, tree-lined gravel lane leading down to our lakefront cottage, I spotted Andrew’s dark blue BMW sedan parked neatly in the gravel driveway beside the detached boathouse.
Good. He hadn't fled.
He was right where he thought he was safe.
I pulled my Porsche smoothly off the gravel, parking it directly behind his BMW so he had zero chance of backing out without a confrontation.
I switched off the engine, pulled the key from the ignition, and sat in the quiet cabin for a moment, listening to the gentle lapping of the lake water against the wooden dock just fifty yards away.
I checked my wristwatch.
Three-fifteen in the afternoon.
May you like
One hour and forty-five minutes until the locks on Maplewood Drive were changed.
Time to begin Act Two.
