Chapter 3: The Casserole and the Sabotage
By March, my sister had launched her campaign. After National Signing Day, Alyssa organized a string of elite donor dinners across East Tennessee, dragging Wade to every country club from here to Knoxville. She flooded her social media with photographs from every stop. In one particularly egregious shot, Wade was shaking hands with a wealthy booster, while Alyssa stood practically plastered to his elbow, gazing up at him with manufactured adoration.
The caption made my blood run cold: “Coach and I taking the signing day tour by storm.”
On the tenth of March, Wade came over for a late dinner. He looked exhausted, the bags under his eyes heavy. He dropped his phone face-down on my kitchen island.
“I had to have a deeply uncomfortable conversation with your sister this afternoon,” he said, rubbing his temples. “She’s been writing ‘Coach and I’ in official university donor emails. I had to pull her into my office, remind her we are strictly colleagues, and order her to stop.”
A cold dread coiled in my gut. “Did… did you tell her about us?”
“No,” he said, walking around the counter to pull me into his chest. He smelled like turf and clean sweat. “That is your family. That is your truth to tell, when you’re ready.”
“Please,” I begged into his shirt, terrified of the fallout. “Please just don’t embarrass her. Let her delusion die quietly.”
Wade pulled back, his jaw setting into a hard, uncompromising line. He looked at me for a long, calculating moment. “Okay, Mary. I’ll play it your way. But not forever.”
Not forever, as it turned out, meant less than eight weeks.
The Saturday before Easter Sunday, my phone buzzed aggressively on my nightstand. The clock read 6:09 A.M. It was a motion alert from my porch’s doorbell camera. Groggy and disoriented, I squinted at the screen, saw a blurry shape retreating toward the curb, assumed it was an overly ambitious Amazon driver, and rolled over, burying my face in Wade’s shoulder.
When Wade finally left and I opened the front door at seven-thirty, I froze. Sitting dead center on my welcome mat was a heavy, glass casserole dish covered in aluminum foil. It was chicken and rice, still radiating a faint heat. Taped to the foil was a note written in the unmistakable, slanted cursive of my mother.
“Thought you might be lonely this Easter. —Mom.”
I stood on the porch, the cold morning air biting through my robe, holding that dish like it was an unexploded bomb. My mother had never, not once in thirty-six years, baked me a casserole. Not when I survived three days of labor to open my clinic. Not when I had walking pneumonia and couldn’t get out of bed for a week.
My heart did a pathetic, hopeful flutter. Maybe this is it, I thought. Maybe this is her olive branch. Maybe she realizes she pushed too hard. I carried the dish inside and placed it in the refrigerator. I never took a single bite of it.
Twelve days later, she called the clinic. Her voice was shockingly warm—not her usual polite, strained warmth, but the genuine, honeyed tone she used to reserve for when I was a little girl running a high fever.
“Mary, sweetheart,” she cooed. “The Ridgeback Scholarship Gala is on the second of May. Your father and I desperately want you there. Sit with us at our table. Your father would just be thrilled. We’ve already purchased your ticket.”
Tickets to the Gala were three hundred and fifty dollars a plate. My parents hadn’t bought me a ticket to a movie since I was fourteen. Every alarm bell in my nervous system should have been screaming. But I was so starved for her affection, I only heard what I desperately wanted to hear: a mother asking for her daughter.
“Okay,” I whispered, blinking back tears. “I’ll be there.”
Later that month, riding the high of this supposed reconciliation, I stood in the greeting card aisle of the local pharmacy for twenty minutes. Mother’s Day was approaching. I selected a beautiful card adorned with pale yellow roses. Inside, elegant script read: “To the mom who taught me everything.” I placed it on my kitchen counter, leaving it unsigned. Every morning I stared at it, trying to manifest the perfect words to heal our rift.
Wade had his own grueling schedule for the night of the Gala. Before the main ballroom opened, he was mandated to attend a hyper-exclusive reception for the million-dollar donors up in the university president’s private suite. According to the run-of-show, he was scheduled to descend into the main ballroom at exactly 7:04 P.M., immediately after the welcoming remarks, to take his seat at the head table.
When the Booster Club demanded his RSVP, Wade had submitted: Coach Larkin + 1 Guest. He refused to provide a name.
“Your sister has harassed my administrative assistant twice this week trying to find out who my plus-one is,” he told me, a week before the event. We were sitting on my back steps, the twilight settling over the yard. He sounded darkly amused.
I wasn’t laughing. A sickening knot had been tightening in my stomach for days. I traced the outline of the sapphire ring beneath my shirt.
“If it comes out at the gala, it comes out,” I said, my voice trembling slightly. “I’m done hiding in the shadows.”
He turned, his eyes locking onto mine with terrifying intensity. “Are you absolutely sure, Mary?”
“I’m sure.”
“Then hear me now,” he said, his voice dropping an octave. “When I walk through those double doors, I am coming straight to get you.”
Wade Larkin kept his promises. I knew that in my bones. What I had failed to comprehend was just how heavily my own family was counting on me to keep mine—the unspoken vow I had made at birth to remain the silent, accommodating punching bag.
Then came the phone call that unraveled everything.
It was Tess Holbrook. Tess was the fearsome chairwoman of the Booster Club’s board of directors, a former hospital CFO who possessed a face that never wasted an expression. I had spoken to her perhaps three times in my life.
When her name flashed on my screen, my blood turned to ice. “Dr. Grissom,” her voice was crisp, lacking any warmth. “I require you to come by the Booster Club office immediately. There is a matter regarding an email I received. An email from your father.”
