My voice wobbles with a hammer throbbing in my cheek, with fear of the force of his backhand. I glance at Beatrix, watching silently from her recliner next to mine, her hands sticking out from the duct-tape bonds in tight, hard fists.

The man watches me from the other side of the coffee table.

“You’d think I would have learned. After everything that I’d heard from his former chefs and partners, I should have known Cam would pull some kind of dirty tricks. I should have known he’d find the biggest shark in town and sic him on my lawyer. He crushed us, found somebody who could win on might rather than merit.” The stupid phone chirps again, and he reaches down to unbutton the flap on his cargo pants, his eyes flashing. “And it wasn’t just me he took down. He took down my whole family.”

My mind flips through what I can remember of Cam’s legal issues. The problem is there have been so many. Beyond the basic hazards in serving the public—falls, broken glass, burns and cuts and food poisoning—there are a million things that can go wrong. Labor laws, noncompetes, immigration issues, liquor licensing, noise and traffic. Most of them frivolous enough he doesn’t bother to share, or if he does, it’s only to vent and complain. I hear him out, but I rarely remember the specifics.

“Did you go to trial?” I ask, because those are the only disputes I know something about, and miraculously, there have been only two. The first was ages ago, a leasing dispute when Cam opened his second shop, which became the impetus for his strategy of owning the real estate for his restaurants whenever possible.

The other was almost two years ago. A location on the outskirts of Atlanta that fell through at the last minute, a disgruntled almost-partner Cam dismissed as sour grapes. He sued, Cam won. The end.

Or so we thought.

“Hell yes, we went to trial. There is something seriously wrong with the legal system in this country when the only way to win is by having the deepest pockets. My attorney went up against a whole team of Cam’s hotshots, who buried her in paperwork and nonsense. They froze my bank accounts, put a lien on my house and intimidated my family with an armed private investigator who followed us all over town. They played every dirty trick in the book, and it worked. I’d lost before I even stepped foot in the courtroom.”

The phone rings again, and he pulls it from his pocket, but he doesn’t look. Not yet.

I keep his attention on me. “So that’s why us. That’s why this house.”

This—all of this—it’s about Cam. About resentment and animosity. The kids and me, we’re just pawns.