PART 1
“I will deposit the girls’ child support payments every month, but beyond that, you shouldn’t expect a single penny from my family,” Raymond Miller told me as my husband, standing in front of the family court building in San Diego while our four daughters listened right behind me.
My name is Brenda Miller, I am forty-two years old, and for sixteen years I truly believed I had built a real family. That morning I understood that, for my husband and his mother, I had only built the inheritance they planned to give to a son someday.
Gaby, my fifteen-year-old daughter, was the first one to react to his harsh words.
“Didn’t you fight to keep us because you wanted to avoid problems, or was it because you never really loved us?” Gaby asked him directly.
Raymond remained completely silent in response.
Paige looked down at the pavement, while Maya pressed her lips tightly together, and six-year-old Zoey clung desperately to my jacket.
Raymond pointed toward our bags on the curb and asked, “Are you really leaving today?”
“We are heading to Phoenix, where my sister already found us a place to stay,” I replied calmly.
He gave a condescending smile that still makes me angry whenever I recall it.
“When you discover that starting from scratch with four young girls isn’t so easy, feel free to call me,” Raymond sneered.
I chose not to answer his arrogant comment.
An hour later, our taxi was speeding directly toward the San Diego airport.
As the car moved forward, Zoey asked a heart-wrenching question from the back seat, “Mom, is Grandma Florence also going to give all of my favorite toys to Leo?”
Leo was the infant son of Brenda, the woman with whom Raymond had been cheating on me for months.
Florence, my former mother-in-law, was completely obsessed with that child because Raymond had shown her a DNA test that supposedly confirmed Leo was his biological son.
After four granddaughters, Raymond finally had his cherished male heir.
That single word had slowly destroyed our entire household over the years.
When Gaby was born, Florence casually remarked that a baby girl was acceptable just to start with.
When Paige arrived, Florence asked us when we were going to try for a real boy.
She stopped visiting the hospital altogether after Maya came into the world.
When Zoey was born, Florence looked at my newborn baby from the foot of the bed and asked, “Who is going to take over the factory someday if you only have women?”
She was referring to Pacific Oak Crafting, the family business that I had personally saved sixteen years ago when it was practically bankrupt.
When I first met Raymond, his father, Walter Miller, owned a tiny, heavily indebted workshop near Chula Vista. I worked in commercial furniture distribution at the time and had saved money for years, while my parents even sold a plot of land to support us.
Between my personal savings and my family’s financial aid, we invested almost six million dollars into the business.
I modernized the machinery, secured new regional distributors, organized the chaotic bookkeeping, and built the company’s administrative structure from scratch.
Years later, we operated two manufacturing plants, employed over one hundred and eighty workers, and held distribution contracts across the entire region.
I legally owned forty-three percent of the company’s total shares.
Walter owned twenty-four percent of the shares.
Raymond owned thirty-three percent of the company.
Gavin, Raymond’s younger brother, never received any stock because he was always chasing reckless schemes that caused severe financial losses.
Perhaps that was the exact reason why Gavin hated me so intensely over the years.
My mobile phone vibrated continuously just as we were about to walk into the airport terminal.
It was a text message from Teresa, the loyal woman who had worked as a housekeeper for my in-laws for almost ten years.
Her message read, “Take the girls away safely, Mrs. Brenda. Tonight I am going to reveal the absolute truth, and after what I say, that family will never be able to look anyone in the eye again.”
