My Ex-Husband’s New Wife Knocked on My Door and Smirked: “We’re Entitled to Your Father’s Estate — You Need to Move Out.” She Didn’t Expect My Lawyer to Be Standing Behind Her
The morning dew still clung to the roses when I heard the crunch of expensive heels on my garden path. I didn’t need to look up to know who it was. Only one person would dare to wear designer shoes to stomp through my father’s prized garden at seven in the morning.
“Victoria,” her voice dripped with artificial sweetness, each syllable carefully modulated to convey superiority masked as concern. “Still playing in the dirt, I see.”
I continued pruning my father’s white roses, the ones he’d planted twenty years ago when I graduated from college with my degree in botanical science. Each careful cut of the pruning shears was deliberate, methodical—the same systematic approach that had made my father successful in business and that I now applied to maintaining his legacy garden. “Hello, Evelyn.”The woman standing behind me was Evelyn Hartwell, my stepmother of exactly eighteen months. She had married my father, Charles Blackwood, in what everyone assumed was a late-life romance but what I now suspected had been something far more calculated. At sixty-eight, my father had been lonely after my mother’s death from cancer three years earlier, vulnerable to the attention of a sophisticated woman who seemed to appreciate both his intellect and his substantial wealth.
