Chapter 4 - The Champagne Delusion
Inside the great room of the Lake Tahoe villa, the celebration was reaching a crescendo.
Olivia stood in the center of the kitchen, her bare feet resting on the heated Italian quartzite floor that I had spent four months selecting and shipping from Verona. She held a crystal wine glass from my mother's hand-blown Austrian stemware set, swaying slightly to the indie-pop music blaring from my custom-installed architectural speakers.
"I’m telling you, Dad, we knock out this entire western wall," Olivia said, gesturing grandly with her glass toward the floor-to-ceiling glass panels overlooking the lake. "We replace it with accordion sliding doors that open completely to the fire pit. It’ll make the indoor-outdoor transition seamless for the summer galas."
Charles sat in my leather Eames lounge chair, a glass of my twenty-year-old single malt scotch in his hand. He looked like an emperor surveying a freshly conquered province.
"Whatever you want, sweetheart," Charles said, taking a slow sip and savoring the burn. "This place was wasted on Rebecca. She lives like a monk. Did you see her bedroom? A single dresser, a plain bed, and a rack of uniforms. A four-million-dollar estate, and she treated it like a barracks."
"She’s emotionally stunted, Charles," Susan chimed in from the kitchen island, where she was casually slicing artisan cheese on my end-grain walnut cutting board. The sapphire pendant bounced against her silk blouse, catching the recessed LED lighting. "The military ruins people. It makes them rigid. She doesn't understand hospitality. She doesn't understand *lifestyle*."
David walked down the floating walnut staircase, holding his phone in landscape mode as he recorded a video for his social media followers.
"What's up, everyone?" David spoke into the microphone with a smooth, manufactured grin. "Just checking in from our new Tahoe retreat. Incredible views over the water. It’s been a brutal year rebuilding after the venture capital shift, but when family comes together and God opens doors, this is what resilience looks like. Drop a comment below if you want the link to my upcoming masterclass on wealth manifestation."
He ended the recording, lowered the phone, and let his smile instantly vanish.
"Did Rebecca take her Jeep?" David asked, looking out the panoramic windows. "She’s not going to come back with some military buddies and make a scene, is she? Because my investor from Palo Alto is driving up tomorrow morning, and I can't have some butch naval officer screaming in the driveway."
Charles waved his hand dismissively. "Rebecca won't do a damn thing. I know my daughter. She obeys authority. She’s spent twenty years taking orders from men with stars on their shoulders. When I tell her to back off, she backs off. She knows who the head of this family is."
"She looked furious, Dad," Olivia said, refilling her glass from the third bottle of wine she had pulled from my temperature-controlled cellar. "The way she looked at Susan's necklace... I honestly thought she was going to tackle Susan."
Susan instinctively pressed a hand against the cold diamonds and sapphires at her throat. "This belongs to the family. Evelyn would have wanted a real mother figure to wear it, not some sailor who spends nine months a year on a steel ship smelling like diesel fuel."
"Exactly," Charles said firmly. "Rebecca’s problem has always been her selfishness. She makes over a hundred and forty thousand a year in base pay, plus housing allowances, hazard pay, flight bonuses—and she has zero expenses! The Navy pays for her food, her clothes, her medical care. Everything! And yet, every time I asked for a little bridge loan to help our family through a crisis, she made me sign promissory notes."
Charles snorted with derisive laughter, rattling the ice in his glass.
"Promissory notes!" Charles mocked. "Can you imagine? Making your own flesh and blood sign notes like a common bank? She thought she could hold that over my head. Well, possession is nine-tenths of the law. We are in the house. The locks are changed. Her name might be on the county paperwork, but no judge in Placer or El Dorado County is going to throw a mother, a father, and two innocent young grandchildren out into the cold so a single woman can leave a four-million-dollar house sitting empty forty weeks a year."
Upstairs, the heavy stomping of Olivia’s two children, nine-year-old Hunter and seven-year-old Chloe, reverberated through the ceiling.
A loud, splintering crash echoed down the stairwell, followed by guilty giggles.
Olivia didn't even look up. "Hunter! Chloe! Be careful with whatever that was!"
"It was just a vase, Mom!" Hunter shouted back from the mezzanine.
"Leave it for the cleaners!" Olivia shouted back with a laugh. She looked back at David. "We need to hire that housekeeping service the Montgomerys use. The ones who come twice a week with the organic lavender sprays."
"We'll put it on Rebecca’s utilities account," Charles suggested casually. "The automated bills are still drawing from her operational credit union account. We don't touch that until we have to. Let her pay the power, the gas, and the internet for the next six months while we establish formal residency."
David clinked his glass against Olivia’s. "To family," he said.
"To our new home," Olivia replied, beaming.
May you like
Outside, the first shadows of twilight began to stretch across the driveway. Down at the perimeter gates, the high-intensity headlights of three vehicles cut through the gathering darkness, their beams illuminating the stone pillars and the ridiculous white balloons fluttering in the wind.
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