Chapter 4 - THE WOMAN WHO SENT THE SCREENSHOTS
On Monday morning Emily received a call from a woman who identified herself as Kathleen Price, a former bookkeeper for Barbara. The voice was cautious, and the woman asked to meet somewhere public because she had already lost one job for refusing to alter a financial report.
They met at a bakery under fluorescent lights that made everyone look tired. Kathleen kept her hands around a paper cup and explained she had overheard Barbara speaking to Ryan about obtaining “a dependable caregiver history” that could be presented in a dispute with Emily; she had sent the screenshots after Barbara asked her to print and bind a selection of Ryan's messages.
Emily's anger rose when she learned Kathleen had waited three days before introducing herself. Kathleen accepted the criticism, saying Barbara had threatened to accuse her of theft and that she could not afford to lose another source of work while caring for her own mother.
Denise joined by speakerphone and asked Kathleen how she obtained the messages. Kathleen said Barbara had forwarded the thread to her own office email with instructions to print it, and she had retained a copy of the forwarded email with headers; she agreed to provide the original electronic record through counsel rather than ask Emily to trust edited images.
Kathleen also disclosed that Barbara's mansion was not as financially secure as its columns suggested. The home had been refinanced repeatedly, its upkeep exceeded her retirement income, and Ryan had been transferring money to cover shortfalls without telling Emily.
Emily knew the marriage had carried financial tensions, but Ryan had described those transfers as temporary help after his father's death. Kathleen showed Denise a list of payments marked “caregiving arrangement,” a phrase that suggested a possible attempt to make Barbara's role with Lily appear established and compensated.
At home Emily opened the joint account statements she had ignored during the upheaval. Some transfers were small, others substantial, and several arrived just before Barbara's property-tax deadlines; she did not yet know whether the transactions were unauthorized, but she understood that the childcare arrangement and financial dependence might be connected.
Meanwhile Ryan called Nora's house instead of Emily's phone, hoping his sister-in-law would persuade her to come home. Nora told him Lily was safe and he could speak with Denise about arrangements; when he accused Nora of destroying his marriage, she asked whether he had ever once called to ask if Lily's skin had healed.
The question ended the call. Nora put down the receiver and went outside to where Lily was carefully painting a cardboard house purple, making sure the little girl had heard none of the argument.
That evening Kathleen sent a photograph of an invoice for something called the “Family Stability Assessment,” billed not to Ryan but to an entity named Whitmore Family Holdings. The amount was small compared with Barbara's property bills, yet Emily recognized the deeper danger: someone was paying to create an institutional story about a child whose actual needs they had refused to meet.
Denise asked an investigator to verify the invoice and the business registration. She warned Emily that suspicious paperwork was not necessarily unlawful, and that the objective was to separate distasteful behavior from provable deception before any hearing.
Emily went to bed exhausted and dreamed of Lily standing outside a house with locked glass doors. When she woke at three, the child was asleep across the hall and the door was not locked; Emily stood there for a long moment, measuring the difference between fear imagined and fear she could act upon.
Kathleen described an afternoon in Barbara's office when the older woman had asked her to create a binder labeled CHILDCARE HISTORY. Barbara dictated entries about Lily's meals and naps as though she were describing a months-long arrangement, but Kathleen could remember several dates when Lily had not been in the house at all. Kathleen refused to invent records, offering instead to organize whatever authentic documents Barbara possessed, and the conversation ended with Barbara saying that loyalty mattered more than a bookkeeper's opinions.
After that incident Kathleen began keeping a written account of instructions she considered improper, including dates and the names of people present. She was not a detective and had never expected her notes to matter outside an employment dispute; in Emily's situation, however, the details could help distinguish the records Barbara wanted created from the care actually provided. Denise cautioned that the notes themselves would need proper verification and could not substitute for testimony or original records.
Emily asked Kathleen whether she had ever seen Barbara behave kindly toward Lily. Kathleen said she had seen her give the girl a beautiful coat and boast about it to guests, but she also remembered Lily being scolded for leaving fingerprints on a glass door. The contrast made Emily shiver: Barbara seemed most comfortable with a granddaughter who displayed her generosity and least comfortable with a child who had needs of her own.
Later that day Emily and Nora packed the few belongings Ryan had delivered through an agreed third party. Lily's stuffed rabbit had been placed carefully on top of the box, but underneath were framed wedding photographs Ryan had included without asking; Emily turned them facedown, unwilling to let the pictures dictate what the next chapter of her life was supposed to look like.
She found a child's drawing among the photographs, one Lily had made of a garden with a blue door. Emily hung it beside the kitchen table instead of putting it into storage, deciding that their new home would be built around signs of Lily's imagination rather than monuments to a marriage that had not protected her.
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Kathleen also described a moment when Barbara asked her to prepare a payment receipt for childcare on a day Lily had spent entirely with Emily. Kathleen had declined and made a note in the margin of the ledger identifying the discrepancy, not knowing whether the demand reflected careless bookkeeping or a wish to establish a false pattern. Denise told her to preserve that distinction in any statement: an instruction to prepare an inaccurate receipt was a fact she could describe, but Barbara's private intention was not something she could directly observe.
After the meeting Emily walked to her car through a crowded parking lot and saw a grandmother gently tying a child's shoelace. The ordinary gesture caught her off guard. She had wanted Lily to have that kind of relationship, and part of the grief she carried was for experiences that would now have to remain distant unless Barbara showed genuine, sustained change.
