That evening, the house felt less like a home and more like a besieged fortress. The girls tried to keep my spirits up, but the tension was a physical presence in every room.
Chloe, still reeling from the reveal of her secret contact with Victoria, looked pale and withdrawn. She kept fiddling with a silver bracelet, a gift Victoria had sent.
Maya, on the other hand, was a whirlwind of focused fury. Her fingers flew across her laptop keyboard, the screen glowing with complex lines of code and news feeds. She saw the doctored clip of me. She saw the social media comments. She saw the betrayal.
“They’re calling you ‘Grandpa Grim,'” she muttered, her eyes narrowing. “They’re saying you brainwashed us.”
I just nodded. What could I say?
“This isn’t just some vanity project for her, Grandpa,” Maya announced suddenly, pushing her laptop toward me. Her voice was sharp, cutting through the silence. “There’s a reason she’s doing all of this, exactly like this.”
The screen displayed what looked like a corporate legal document. My eyes struggled with the small print, but Maya zoomed in. It was a contract.
“What is this, Maya?” I asked, a knot forming in my gut.
“It’s a network deal,” she said, her finger tracing a line on the screen. “Victoria Pendelton, officially ‘Victoria Delacroix,’ signed this with Zenith Streaming.”
My gaze fell on the bold title: *Reclaiming My Daughters*. A six-part docuseries. My daughters. The audacity made my blood boil.
“Look at this clause,” Maya instructed, pointing to a paragraph near the bottom. Her voice was cold. “Clause 7B, subsection three.”
The text was clear, chillingly so. It detailed a payment structure, a grand total of fifteen million dollars for Victoria. But there was a condition. A final bonus.
“She gets a five million dollar payout,” Maya read aloud, her voice tight with suppressed anger, “only upon successful on-camera custody reconciliation or court-ordered compliance, verified by an independent legal arbiter, before the end of the current fiscal quarter.”
A gasp escaped Chloe’s lips. Sienna stared at the screen, her mouth slightly open.
This was Twist 4. My daughter wasn’t here for remorse, or for us. She was here for a payday. Fifteen million dollars, riding on our forced “reconciliation.” My granddaughters were just props in a reality show, their lives a storyline for her bank account.
“So, all the tears, all the ‘longing for her babies’… it’s all for the cameras?” Chloe whispered, her voice barely audible. Her hand went to her silver bracelet, then she ripped it off, letting it clatter onto the table.
Maya nodded grimly. “She needs us to cry with her, on live television. Or she needs a judge to make us.”
The silence that followed was heavy with a new kind of dread. This wasn’t just about my reputation anymore. This was about a ruthless, calculated plan to exploit my family for a massive sum of money. She wouldn’t stop until she got her five million dollars.
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