Chapters (57)
This is another almost too perfect community, if you ask me, filled with multimillion-dollar homes boasting grassy yards, trees and even sidewalks for kids. At the beach, we don’t have space for sidewalks. My stomach turns as I park in front of her next-door neighbor’s lovely home.
This home has a lot of space for a single woman in her twenties. But I know she has big plans. They both do. They text each other about their dreams all the time. I just simply cannot believe he was serious. He bought this house for her, for them. Not for us. Not for a fresh start.
I open the car door and my hands clench into fists as I remember David’s text promise to help her fill a house with babies someday, while of course leaving one room free for Betsy. They wouldn’t want her to feel left out. I’m not even an afterthought. Not a consideration. Instead of consoling his poor, grief-stricken wife, David thinks he’s moving on with a new model home, and wife.
Because poor Kylie will never be David’s next wife. Her dreams are about to become her worst nightmare.
We should start by calling Kylie by her real name, Nancy Finch. Nancy was born in some tiny town in North Dakota, made her way to Vegas after high school and landed a fabulous sugar daddy. Herbert Holiday struck it big with his casino and hotel complex. He was known to be cheap, until little Nancy came along. She married him when she was twenty and he was sixty-five. Gross, right?
There’s more. Turns out Nancy Holiday has a pending warrant out for her arrest in Las Vegas. Can you imagine? And these weren’t just a case of passing around a few bad checks at the grocery store or nail salon. No, Nancy forged her sugar daddy’s name on at least ten checks, paid herself hundreds of thousands of dollars. When he died suddenly—tragic accidental overdose of Viagra mixed with his heart medicine—Herbert’s grown and estranged kids got control of the estate. That’s when they discovered he’d been conned. Of course, by then, Nancy had taken her newly minted breasts and disappeared.
Until now.
I smile as I walk up to her new, move-in-ready home. And how did I piece all of this together? Bottom line: it just takes one to know one. I’m on my computer all the time these days, and it’s not just researching tragic accidental deaths. Now you know what else I’m fixated on.
Poor David will be shocked. Fortunately for him, this love nest is in both of their names. So once she’s gone it will belong to him—and me because actually I own half of everything that’s his. Even this stupid house.