Carla Friedel stood in the center of my kitchen. Her finger jabbed at the ceiling, then swept across the walls, and finally pointed at the hardwood floor beneath her expensive pumps.
Eleven days after I had buried my husband, she looked me dead in the eye. She told me she was taking all of it. The house. Joel’s law firm. Every bank account, every asset, down to the last dusty quarter in the jar.
She wanted everything—except our four-year-old daughter, Tessa.
I will never forget the casual cruelty in her voice. It was as if she were returning a sweater that didn’t fit. She said she “didn’t sign up for someone else’s child.”
My name is Miriam Friedel. I am thirty-one years old. Until recently, I lived in Covington, Kentucky.
It’s a small city that sits right across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. It is the kind of tight-knit place where neighbors wave to each other from their driveways. Somehow, through the grapevine, they always knew exactly what you paid for your house.
I married Joel Friedel when I was twenty-four. He was a personal injury attorney who had built his own firm from absolutely nothing. Well, nothing except a $185,000 loan from his mother and about six thousand hours of his own sweat and blood.
He started in a tiny, rented office above a flooring store on Madison Avenue. It was the kind of low-rent space where you could hear customers picking out laminate samples through the floorboards every time a client sat down for a consultation.
But Joel was relentless. Within five years, he had moved to a real office suite, hired a small staff, and was billing over $600,000 a year.
Friedel & Associates. His name was on the door. His mother never let anyone forget who had paid for the paint on that door.
Joel died on a Thursday evening, March 6th. Cardiac arrest. They found him at his desk at the office, his hand still wrapped around his coffee mug. He was only thirty-six years old.
I got the call while I was giving Tessa a bath. I remember driving to the office with my wet sleeves rolled up to my elbows and soap still caked under my fingernails. My heart hammered against my ribs. By the time I got there, the paramedics had already stopped trying.
The funeral was the following Wednesday. Carla wore black Chanel sunglasses indoors. They were the massive kind that cover half your face, making it impossible to tell if the person is actually crying or just performing grief for an audience.
Standing next to her was Spencer, Joel’s younger brother. He looked like a truant kid waiting for the principal. He was twenty-nine, had never held a job for more than five months, and lived in Carla’s guest house in Burlington. His primary responsibilities in life were sleeping until noon and ordering gadgets off the internet with his mother’s credit card.
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