Chapter 5 - THE PUBLIC MASK OF VIVIAN
To the rest of the world, Vivian Mercer was a pillar of the community, a retired schoolteacher who volunteered at the local library and spent her weekends posting immaculate updates about her adoring family. Her Facebook profile was a curated museum of staged hugs, homemade apple pies, and captions praising her son and "precious daughter-in-law". Only Natalie and I knew the hollow truth behind the curtain. Natalie had spent her childhood enduring Vivian’s perfectionist tyranny, molded as the scapegoat while I was kept as the golden child—until I married Emma, a woman Vivian couldn't control or shape into her own image. When Emma became pregnant, Vivian had forced her way into our lives under the guise of maternal expertise, slowly tightening a velvet-lined noose around our household. Now, watching her stand over my bleeding, exhausted wife with my newborn son acting as a physical hostage, that public mask was about to be burned to ashes.
