There are times when you're faced with something so outrageous, so out of left field, so unbelievable that it takes a minute for your brain to catch up. I felt my phone vibrate with a text, most likely from Kade in response to the one I quickly shot off to him before I opened the door to his mother.
Your mother is here
By barging into my house without being invited, she'd proven my she's a vampire theory to be false. So now I had to go back to my other working theory that she was clearly the spawn of Satan.
The buzzing of my phone was relentless by now.
"OK, let me check that Griff is still asleep on my app before we talk," I said to her. "I heard him making noises just before you arrived."
Lies. We didn't have a smartphone monitor app.
"OK, he's good. So, let me get this straight," I said to her. "You seriously want me to name my price to sell Griffin to you, give up all my rights to him and walk away from my son?"
"Kade's son. My grandson."
"OK. Let's see...how about nine hundred ninety-nine kajillion as a number?"
"That's a nonsense number!" she protested.
"A nonsense number for a bullshit offer seems fitting to me."
She shook her head at me. "So crude and classless. You're not fit to be with Kade or be Griffin's mother."
"I'm not the one trying to buy a baby, so you may need to re-think which one of us qualifies as classless and unfit to be a mother." In addition to totally fucking psychotic.
"I've sacrificed everything as a mother for my children."
"Really? Because from where I'm standing, it seems like you've got that backwards. Kade had to sacrifice everything for you."
"You know nothing about what I've given up."
Your sanity? Your grip on reality?
"You're right. All I know is what Kade had to give up because you dumped your husband's failures and mistakes right into his lap and made him take responsibility for them. He had to marry Charlotte and live a miserable existence for years -- to protect you and Katie and the business. I hear a whole lot of Kade sacrificing in that, but not one bit of you."
"Charlotte was fine, just a bit temperamental and if Kade had just tried harder with her --"
"Like tried harder to get her psychiatric help? Help that her father refused to allow until Kade threatened him? That kind of help?"
"Kade exaggerates."
"I think you're the one with the problem with reality. How many grandmothers try to buy their grandchildren and get the mother to sign away her rights? Why do you even want me out of Griffin's life?"
"Because as long as you're in his life, we can't pass him off as Charlotte's."
Aaannnnd the train just blew past Crazyville and headed straight for Insanitytown, no stops along the way.
"Are you kidding me? How can you pass him off as a dead woman's baby?"
"We used you as the surrogate and had Charlotte and Kade's frozen embryo implanted in you."
I couldn't even...
Was she serious?
Apparently, she was because she continued spinning her little fantasy.
"It would help his campaign for the U.S. Senate. Imagine how precious it would be that after all these years, despite his daughter's tragic death, he was able to hold his beloved daughter's child. Griffin and Kade could be there at his campaign stops and appearances. That would bring in the votes like you couldn't imagine."
