Chapter 10 - JEREMY NEEDED THE TWO WOMEN TO DISLIKE EACH OTHER
The biggest discovery came from Jeremy’s messages.
Not secret surveillance.
Ordinary discovery in the marital and business disputes.
Rachel found the pattern first.
Whenever Blaire complained about Edith, Jeremy reinforced one idea:
She contributes more than you realize.
Whenever Edith complained about Blaire, Jeremy reinforced the opposite:
Blaire acts like it’s only her house because the deed hasn’t been updated yet.
He did not merely tolerate conflict.
He managed it.
One message to Edith:
She left the AC at 70 again. She doesn’t understand what carrying a place like this costs.
Blaire had never set the AC to 70.
Another:
Don’t bring up the equity paperwork with her when she’s stressed. She gets weird about anything from before the marriage.
To Blaire that same week:
Mom paid the electric and housekeeping again. Please don’t make her feel like a guest.
Then a message to Logan:
Mom being in the house keeps Blaire from watching every dollar I move. She hates conflict with her, so she stays out of the household account.
Blaire stopped reading.
That was the twist.
Jeremy did not simply lie separately to avoid embarrassment.
He needed hostility between the women.
Edith’s presence made Blaire withdraw from household management because every financial question became a family argument.
Blaire’s distance allowed Jeremy to route more expenses through the joint account without scrutiny.
Meanwhile Jeremy encouraged Edith’s belief that she was financially supporting the household because it made her police Blaire’s spending.
Electricity.
Groceries.
Housekeeping.
Pool use.
Repairs.
Every dollar Edith shamed Blaire into not spending left more liquidity Jeremy could redirect elsewhere.
The AC incident was not an isolated personality clash.
It was the end product of a financial system Jeremy had quietly engineered.
Three earlier details changed instantly.
Jeremy’s smug silence while Edith held the remote against Blaire’s head was not simply cowardice.
Edith was enforcing a hierarchy he had spent months constructing.
His panic when Blaire produced the deed came because the deed did not only threaten Edith’s fantasy.
It threatened the wall separating the two women’s financial stories.
And his insistence that Blaire “not make his mother feel like a guest” had never been about kindness.
If Edith accepted that she was a guest, she might ask what happened to $350,000 that was supposed to make her an owner.
Blaire put the messages down.
Rachel waited.
Finally Blaire said:
“He made us useful to each other as enemies.”
Rachel nodded.
Blaire had spent seventeen months believing the problem in her home was an overbearing mother-in-law.
Edith had spent seventeen months believing the problem was an entitled daughter-in-law wasting a house partly purchased with Carter money.
Jeremy stood between them.
Loved by both.
May you like
Questioned fully by neither.
That arrangement was not an accident.
