Chapter 5: What Kayla Knew
Kayla told me everything at my kitchen table while Lily slept on my chest. She talked fast and quietly, like the words had been stuck in her throat for weeks.
Grant had been trading options on his phone since last spring. At first he won. Then he borrowed against his 401(k) to win bigger. Then he borrowed from a man his college roommate knew, at an interest rate that made me feel sick.
By the time I was seven months pregnant, he owed almost three hundred thousand dollars.
“He came to me in August,” Kayla said. “He said if he could just get the house into his name, he could sell it, pay everything off, and buy you something smaller and newer before the baby came. He said you’d be relieved. He said you hated the stairs.”
I didn’t hate the stairs. My father carried me up those stairs every night until I was nine.
“Why involve your mom?”
“Because Mom would never let it look like Grant was stealing from his wife,” Kayla said. “So he told her you were unstable. That you might take the baby and leave. That he needed the house in his name to protect Lily. She believed him. She always believes him.”
So Diane changed the locks thinking she was saving her granddaughter. And Grant let her do it, because a mother-in-law locking out a new mom would get me to sign anything just to get inside.
This story was written with AI assistance. It is fiction.