Corinne had set her phone down on the table when I walked in, and in her hurry to stand and shout, she left it there, unlocked, screen up. While she was screaming about calling Wesley, I picked it up. There was a group chat, the three of them, going back to the start of the summer. That was the thing far worse than the potato. Rosalind had not offered to watch Theo out of kindness. The messages laid out the whole plan. They intended to spend the summer making Theo miserable, documenting invented behavior problems, and building a case that I was an unstable mother raising a difficult, damaged child, so that when Wesley and I inevitably fought about it, Wesley would have grounds to seek custody and, more importantly, a claim on the country house. Corinne had written it plainly. Get the boy on record, get Delphine emotional, get Wesley the property. The cold dinners were not punishment. They were evidence being manufactured.<\/p>\n
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I did not scream. I forwarded the entire chat to my own phone, then to my email, then to my attorney, before Corinne even noticed her phone was gone. When she did, and lunged for it, I handed it back to her, because I no longer needed it. She did not know yet what I had.<\/p>\n
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